Jaina Political Thought

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

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continue with the glorification of Bharata. Apparently the ideal of empire came to be approved in the Jaina tradition as much as in the other traditions of ancient India. Only the empire could ensure peace and order over the whole land which was considered as the ideal unit of government. Once the Bharata-kse tra of Jambu dvipa is accepted as a natural geopolitical unit, the very arguments which justify government, justify the empire. This comes out clearly in the definition of Chakravarti-ksetra as given by the Arthasastra. The Brahmanical Puranas point out the sociocultural unity of this region beyond which lie the Mlecchas. The Jaina tradition mentions twenty-five and a half janapadas as belonging to the Aryas? In short, the Indian sub-continent came to be generally regarded as united by its general ethos and as constituting a natural region for political unification. The state over this vast region was, however, conceived as governed by an imperialauthority which was in practice really federal in the sense that it willingly accepted subordinate authorities. India was too vast a country to be governed entirely from a single centre. The imperial centre was the fountain-head of authority but it willingly tolerated subordinate rulers who were rooted in their own regions or janapadas, enjoying the loyalty of their own people but governing under the supervision of the imperial authority. The conquest which secured such an empire was traditionally called dharma-vijaya. Thus although the Cakravarti used force, his use of force was deemed righteous because it extended the protection of sovereign authority over the people with Aryan ethos and did not at the same time seek to dispossess the traditional rulers in the regions.
The Jaina Puranic tradition thus required a state to provide livelihood by promoting the six occupations, provide social direction in terms of the three classes, honour, spiritually distinguished people as true Brahmanas, punish crimes and defend the country. It traces the origin of sovereignty in terms of a transformation of a patriarchal authority. It provides a Jaina alternative to the traditional Brahmanical social ethics of varna-dharma. It adapts the conception of universal sovereign and makes it a part of the Jaina traditions. The Puranas thus go considerably beyond the canonical outlook. They accept secular institutions as they were current, but they seek to modify them so as to bring them in line with Jaina faith so far as practicable.
This process of accepting the current institutions with suitable modifications may be seen most clearly in the ideas which Jinasena II puts into the mouth of Bharata. The Puranic theory of three Varnas based on occupations was already a reformist version of the varnadharma, parallels to which may be discovered in the Mahabharata and Buddhist
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