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Men or Gods
Mokşa. There is nothing other which is as perfect. There is no other God. The freed souls are divine in nature, as they are perfect and omniscient.
For the Jaina it is not necessary to surrender to any higher being, nor to ask for any divine favour for the individual to reach the highest goal of perfection. There is no place for divine grace, nor is one to depend on the capricious whims of a superior deity for the sake of attaining the highest ideal. There is emphasis on individual efforts in the moral and spiritual struggle for self-realization. One has to go through the fourteen stages of spiritual development before one reaches the final goal in the ayogakevali stage.
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However, the struggle for perfection is long and arduous. Few reached perfection; and perhaps, as tradition would say, none would become perfect in this age. Among those who have reached omniscience and perfection are the Tirthankaras, the prophets, who have been the beacon lights of Jaina religion and culture. They have preached the truth and have helped men to cross the ocean of this worldly existence. They led men, like kindly light, to the path of spiritual progress.
Therefore, they need to be worshipped. The Jainas worship the Tirthankaras not because they are gods, nor because they are powerful in any other way, but because they are human, and yet divine, as every one is divine, in his essential nature. The worship of the Tirthankaras is to remind us that they are to be kept as ideals before us in our journey to selfrealization. No favours are to be sought by means of worship, nor are they competent to bestow favours on the devotees. The main motive of worship of the Tirthankaras, therefore, is to emulate the example of the perfect beings, possible, at least to remind us that the way to perfection lies in the way they have shown us. Even this worship of Tirthankaras arose out of the exigencies of social and religious existence and survival and possibly as a psychological necessity. We find a
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