Jainism and World Problems

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 55

NEED FOR THE JAINDOCTRINE
like a face to ask them to join you in the effort to secure peace. Be not alarmed about your cloak ; nobody who is filled with the spirit of justice will ever care to take what does not belong to him. The coat, however, you must restore in its entirety, if you want peace for yourself and all others.
The problem of the youth is really solved by the foregoing observations, and may be disposed of here, rather than at the end of the list.
I hope you have already noted that great things can be expected from our youths only if you instil into their hearts, while still impressionable and tender, the principle of ahimsa. If you inject poison into a man's body, can you expect him to have good health and long life ? Just so with the stuffing of the mind with the formula of materialism ; struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Such a man is a danger to himself, and to every one else. He is a powder box and may explode any moment. You should, instead of the inaterialistic creed, fill his mind with such of the spiritual things as contentment, love, justice, and mercy, and see that the teaching sinks into the heart, to make it impossible for him to be anything but a living agent and messenger of goodness, amity and goodwill. This is the only way to succeed. Let me add that you have no chance of impressing the mind of the youths even with the excellence of this most excellent of doctrines if you teach it merely as a dogma of faith. For to override scientific' opposition the doctrine too must be taught as rigidly as a science, which, happily, it stands for, as will be evident from my own books, amongst which I need only mention the KEY OF KNOWLEDGE. If the modern youth is not trained up and disciplined in the way I have indicated nothing great can be expected from him. He will still be a slave to the materialistic tenat, and ready to kill the fit and the unfit both.
It is a mistake to imagine that human progress depends on brute force, or mechanical intellectualism. The brute