Jainism

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

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JAINISM
plunges alone into the jungle. There for twelve years He practises great austerities, striving to realize Himself and to realize the nothingness of all things but the Self; and in the thirteenth year illumination breaks upon Him, and the light of the Self shines forth upon Him, and the knowledge of the Supreme becomes His own. He shakes off the bonds of Avidya and becomes the omniscient, the all-knowing; and then He comes forth as Teacher to the world, teaching for forty-two years of perfect life.
Of the teachings, we are here told practically nothing. The names of some disciples are given, but the life, the incidents, these are all omitted. It is as though the feeling that all this is illusion, it is nothing, had passed into the records of the Teacher, so as to make the outer teaching as nothing, the Teacher Himself as nothing. And then He dies after forty-two years of labour, at Pāpā 526 years before the birth of Christ. Not very much, you see, to say about the Lord Mahāvira; but His life and work are shown in the philosophy that He left, in that which He gave to the world,