Lecture On Jainism

Author(s): Lala Banarasidas
Publisher: Anuvrat Samiti

Page 37

Shastras
( 29 ) pitch durkness. They were the Nastikas who dcnied such a thing as the next world, because they had not seen it.
The truc state of ancient Indit is represented Anwinnt Inotis in Jain in Jain Shastras. It is said therein
that when the Digambara Rishi Rishabha was proclaiming in the world, “Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah!" and was doing good ti mankind, Devas and animals by his Nirakshari Vani, there were also 363 Pakanda teachers who were preaching religions of their own, and one of them was Shukra or Brihaspati, the founder of the Charvaka religion. Certainly this seems to me the true state of affairs in ancient India. In tiine out of mind by the end of the 3rd Kala there was not only one tcacher of one view of lisc, but there were 363, nay more, who preached their diffcrent doctrines and who explained this life and this world as they appeared to them. This opinion bears the sanction of Prof. Max
Müller and almost all other scholars. Mas Muller's opinion. Writing in 1899 when scventy-six years old and when he had ncither the cyes nor the memory which he had at twenty-six and when he could expect younger men to help him as he gladly used to do in his youth to his preceptors and Gurus, that noble philosopher says:
"It would be a mistike to imagine that there was a continuing clevelopment into the various ineanings assumed by or assigned to such pregnant terms as