Jaina Political Thought

Author(s): G C Pandey
Publisher: Prakrit Bharti Academy

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for the Jaina version of the ancient tradition which though essentially universal, was revealed and formulated, transformed and debased, in different ancient societies in characteristically specific forms. This ancient tradition should not be looked upon as merely the archaic matrix of modem ideas. It has to be considered in its own right, for its own perennial value. Properly understood it should serve as a curative to the ills to which modern thought is prone.
Indeed modern and traditional modes of thought should not be distinguished primarily on chronological or evolutionary grounds. They are rather two perennial modes of thought which have acquired primacy in different historical ages. Tradition is the handing down of transcendental wisdom by prophets, seers and masters to a special class of custodians and through them to common humanity, usually in symbolical ways. Accepted in reverence,it reveals the order of cosmic principles which constitute the ground of human reality, psychic as well as social, and enables men to' distinguish between their lower and higher natures and thus to gain inner self-government and freedom. Society and state are only the external projections of these principles and exist ultimately in order to aid the realization of inner self-government. In contrast, the modern view is egoistic and naturalistic. Man is the centre of its thought and it holds man to be a natural creature acquiring knowledge through his own tentative efforts. Such knowledge is consequently empirical and changeable and merely reflects the causal order of sensible things. It can be an aid to the manipulation of material objects in the pursuit of natural or instinctive ends. Traditional wisdom postulates a moral and rational order which subordinates natural and egoistic men to the spirit seeking its supernatural destiny. Modern thought is the historically changing self-expression of egoistic humanity seeking natural satisfaction through the control of natural forces. In traditional thought what is emphasized is man's spiritual destiny and the moral character of his relations to other men. In modern thought the emphasis is on man's historical destiny and the technological determination of his social being. Whether man is a fallen spirit of a creature of blind nature, these constitute two contrasted but perennially available points of view about man and the universe. It is this distinction that underlies the distinction between the traditional and modern world views. Since the common self-consciousness of man is an admixture of spiritual and natural elements, the distinction really is one of emphasis and direction of seeking and construction.
Despite this radical divergence, there is, nevertheless, a common area which the two views share and this consists on the one hand, of the empirically given world of nature and other men as a realm of causal
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