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JAINISM AND WORLD PROBLEMS
meaning of the allegories there arose misunderstandings; and quarrels and blood-shed occurred, with the result that thereafter no one dared openly to preach the Doctrine of Truth before the masses.
Of the prevailing great religions, Muhammadanism is the youngest and Christianity, too, is not much older. Neither of them claims that any one has thus far attained to the suinmuin bonuin from amongst their followers. The same is the case with Judaism. In all these religions the suinmuin bonum is to be attained on a particular day, termed the Judginent Day, which is still far and may be very far off. The teaching of Zoroastrianism is also to the same effect. The notion of the Judgment Day itself is found, on close investigation, to be an allegorical portraying of the attainment of the Great Ideal, namely, the Perfection of Gods; but the point here is only this that no one is deemed to have attained to it in any of the allegorical religions thus far, which shows that they have not produced practical results which a scientific religion should have done. Buddhisın arose something like 2500 years ago, but religious teaching is very much older than that. Of the Vedas the one known as the Rig Veda is certainly very old; but it is allegorical in its composition, and does not name any one who might be said to have been benefited by the teaching and become deified. The source of the Teaching of Truth, therefore, must be sought even outside Hinduism. This source we find in Jainism, which can now be definitely traced back to more than five thousand years in the past, from the archæological data recently unearthed at Mohenjo-Daro in India. Jainism does contain the biographies of a very large number of men who have already attained to Divine Perfection by following its teaching; and in several important particulars, such as the name of its Founder (Risabha Deva) and the number of the Tirthamkaras (Elders in the terminology of the Apocalypse), which is four and twenty, there is available confirmatory testimony from distant
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