Jainism in North India

Author(s): Chimanlal J Shah
Publisher: Longmans Green and Compny London

Page 48

MAHAVIRA AND HIS TIMES considered a nonentity in the social organisation, and the Sūdra was despised out and out.
Naturally such a state of society was not destined to hold a long time. And it did end with the appearance of Mahāvīra on one side, and Buddha Sākyaputta on the other."It is said of the French Revolution," says Dutt," that it was mainly brought about by two causes: the oppression of the kings and the intellectual reaction set in by the philosophers of the 18th century. The Buddhist revolution in India is still more distinctly the result of similar causes. The oppression of Brahmanism made the people sigh for a revolution, and the work of the philosophers opened the path to such a revolution." 2
Di Hopkins goes a little further and lays stress on the psychology of the people with whom these developments first originated. "To a great extent," says the learned scholar, "both Jainism and Buddhism qived their success to the politics of the day. The kings of the East were impatient of the Western Church; they were pleased to throw it over. ... The West was more conservative than the East. It was the home of the rites it favoured. The East was but a foster-father." 3
But we are not out to invent any anti-Brahman prejudice for the explanation of this great Indian revolution. It was “an expression of the general ferment of thought which prevailed at the beginning of the epic period." 4 We need not understand it as a mere " result of Kshatriya protest against the caste exclusiveness of Brahmans," 5 because the ground had been well prepared for the growth of a new belief and new doctrines outside the orthodox bull-work of Brahmanism." 6 Furthermore, the hypothesis of development from which the history of a religion sets out is based on the principle that all changes and transformations in religions, whether they appear from a subjective point of view to indicate decay or progress, are the results of natural growth, and find in it their best explanation.
Coming to our own period we find that this attitude is
1 C Trele, op cit, pp 129-180. Nam, in spite of his oft-quoted line. m e
a cant: prohibited woman even the performance of sacramentalntes a prohibition which he places on woman and the Südra alıke- chaps v, 155; is, 18; and iv , 80 . Dutt, op at, p 225.
* Hopkins, op at, p 282. Radhakrishnan, op cit, i,p 203 Srinivasachari and Iyangar, op at, p 48 & Frazer, op cit, P 117
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