Lord Mahavira

Author(s): Bool Chand
Publisher: Jain Cultural Research Society

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Man's personality in this view consists of two elements, the spiritual and the material; and according, to Jainism, the object of life is so to subdue the latter as to completely shake off its malignant influence and thereby enable the Jiva' to reveal all its inherent excellences in their fulness. A man's action in life may be of two kinds, that which maintains, or even strengthens, the bond of union between the Jiva and matter, and thus-whether it brings pleasure or pain to the doer-effectually keeps the Jiva in a state of bondage, and that which tends to cut asunder the union between Jiva and matter and thus helps the Jiva to attain its freedom and ultimately perfection. The first kind of action, and it is just this action which is germane to what we call wordly achievements, is from a spiritual point of view undeserving of very much attention; and so the Jain biographer, whose main interest is centred on the attainment of the ultimate, has been on the whole inclined to omit it from his analysis. It is only the spiritual activitiy of the individual about which he has written.
Mahavira's Biographies. .
Thus, there is no dearth of biographical material for Mahavira, who holds the honoured position of being the twenty-fourth and last in the galaxy of Tirthankaras of the present age and who is also the ruling personality of the present that (patriarchate); but this material is primarily and essentially concerned with the details of the spiritual activities of Mahavira. Of the purely material side of his life, the details provided are not many and not sufficiently lucid or specific.
Jacobi is of the opinion that the first book ( ra) of the Acharanga sutra and of the Sutrakritanga sutra ‘may be reckoned among the most ancient parts of the. Jain siddhanta', Their style and metre prove the correctness of this opinion. The date of these Sutras would be somewhere between the Pali literature and