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THE JAINA GAZETTE
body. As well might the musician hack at his instrument, the writer split his pen, the mother bind her breast. There are morbid states of body where ascetic pruning may be needed and beneficial. But such bodies we do not consider as, at least for a time, fit for normal rules. They are hospital cases.
For man must advance in the Way with, not aloof from, his fellowmen. It is only there that he can come to know what is really his own Well. He will not do so as a deserter, as a malingerer. Those bruised, emaciated bodies were so many parasites on the working community. So also were king and courtier, army and harem, beggar and courtezan. Counter-service, it was claimed, was rendered by ascetic, as by monk. But it is a doubtful symptom of growth for a man to be content to help his fellows by giving them the spectacle of his pious, but unnecessary sufferings and aloofness. There is a benefit in teaching given, to be set over against support received. But counsels given in exchange for food received was not part of the ascetic's way as such. It was incidental, not essential. His way was to leave the burden of the world's work to others, albeit himself needing the results of that work.
Here then was a twofold initial mistake. In calling it such, I do but give voice to the intelligent conviction of the New World's New Will. It was a mistake to hold that the Man walked more swiftly in the Way with a battered body. It was a mistake to hold that the prize of the Way's-End was for those who had run ahead of their spiritually weaker fellowmen. The knowledge and the wording of the new will came to suffer thereby, as onward moving has ever suffered, when one section of the community has sought to raise itself looking down upon the rest, be the rest the plebs, the laity, the slave, the woman. So the new will, not rightly expressing itself as the healthy advance of the whole man in all men, became, as new will, wordless and diminished in two ways :-in one section of the Indian world it ceased to spread; it grew stationary; it has tended to die rather than grow. In another section of that world it has melted away from India, and where it now survives, either, in the south, it maintains its old uncomproShree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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