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RECONCILIATION.
1077 dhảnta, free from blood-stained symbolism, confounding myths and meaningless, degrading ritual, depicting truth in its naked majesty, are those of the earliest and, therefore, of the purest religion. That truth should have been known to the so-called primitive humanity is not surprising, since knowledge is the very nature of the soul, and only requires to be drawn out by simple living and high thinking, so that the ancients who certainly lived much simpler lives than ourselves were better qualified of the two for the acquisition of wisdom divine.
It will be convenient to notice here an objection which has been raised in certain quarters against our thesis on the score of language. It is said that the language of the Vedas is centuries older than that of the Jaina Books, and upon the strength of this it is contended that Hinduism must be deemed to be older than Jainism. The objection is, however, devoid of force, and in no way incompatible with the conclusions we have arrived at here. It will be seen, first of all, that the language of the Vedas is not the language of the Jaina Books, the former being couched in Sanskrit, 'the polished' tongue, and the latter in Prakrit, or the language of the masses. That being so, it is not easy to arrive at a definite basis of comparison likely to yield conclusive results. Secondly, the Jaina Siddhanta was preserved, like the Vedas, in the memory of men, and was not reduced to writing till several centuries after the nirvana of the last Tirthamkara, Bhagwan Mahâvira. As Max Muller points out, the whole literature of India in the ancient days was preserved by oral tradition only.
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