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MAHẬVÎRA AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
OF LIFE
-A.N. Upadhaye
The quest for the higher on an intellectual or metaphysical plane has been all along, in India, the privilege or province of some outstanding individual or individuals, while the mass of the population, generally steeped in ignorance and poverty, was devoted to crude deification and ancestor-worship. The power of a religious leader lay in his ability to win over to his creed the people around him. In India there have been two types of religious leader : the Priest, and the Ascetic.
The priest was a champion of ritualism. He vigorously claimed that the welfare and indeed the very existence of the world, including even the gods, depended upon the maintenance of their systems of sacrifice, which grew to immense size and complexity. The cults popularised by him were polytheistic; the deities were very often forces of nature; and man was put at their utter mercy, the priest alone being capable of saving him by seeking the favour of the deities through sacrificial rites. This is the line of thought of the Vedic religion and its custodians. It came into India from outside, from the North-West. And, thanks to the mesmeric power exerted by elaborate ritual, it gradually spread towards the East and the South catching handfuls of foliowers here and there.
As distinguished from this, in the East, along the fertile banks of the Ganges and the Jamuna, there flourished in india a succession of ascetic Teachers, who, hailing from rich families, had enough leisure for high thinking and religious meditation. For them, the spirit in nian, and also in all animate beings was the focus of religious meditation as well as an object of
