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MAN AND THE WAY.
111 Now it was not always so. It is not a Vedic ideal, either religious or social. I doubt if the Aryans had it in their immigrant days. There is short shrift, in the wanderer-host, for the man who would cast off the herd-life, the herd-ideals. Liberty is not for him. In solidarity alone is his salvation. But when Jainism and Buddhism arose, they found the ideal of liberation growing into a lusty youngster, the offspring of a stabilized Aryan comity, in which the individual could safely develop himself, and break out of a too static groove. And Jain and Buddhist helped to bring it into Brahmanism. Moksa belongs to middle and later Upanishads.f In all three religions an ardent cult of liberation as man's very salvation has since those days grown up. Scarcely can we yet, of the new world, see how hoary, how barren is its rocky crest, or how unworthy we of both East and West shall judge ourselves to have been, to see in a negative word of 'riddance' our ideal of the Utterly Well!
Let us be quite honest about this word and about ourselves. Riddance, liberation, emancipation, as such, is an ideal of the rebel. And we all do well, in much and at many times, to be rebels. But the ultimate ideal of the wise rebel can never be rebellion, riddance, liberty. These are but words of transition, proximate ideals, words of the struggle to get to the Better. They may have served, they may, and do even now serve as bearers of further ideals. But that does not make them worthy words, in themselves, for those ideals. They serve rather to mask them. And socially they have possibly done as much harm as good.
Here anyway we have seen a Jainist confession of faith, overflowing right and left into terms held in common by other venerable Indian creeds and, in this last term, uniting with those creeds. Is it not profoundly pathetic to find, under this partial, or complete agreement in words, several 'isms' instead of concord, cleavage instead of harmony ? So heavily do we pay in mutual estrangement, mutual strife, mutual hindrance, for our initial mistakes.
What were these initial mistakes ? † Cf. The writer's article Mokoa, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
