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10
VARDHAMANA MAHÂVÎRA*
-R. Davidi
VARDHAMANA MAHÂVÎRA, the founder of the Jain movement was a man urged by an inspiring call to rectify something he saw amiss in the accepted religious mandate of his day.
Now this mandate had been for perhaps some two centuries that volt-face, that inversion in the Naturtheism of the Vedic hymns, best called Immance: the perception of Deity less in powers in nature, and more in the essential nature, and more in the essential nature of man. Learners in Brahman schools were told: "This immortal fear-less Brahman, this art thou: Worship Brahman as the self (or as I prefer to say, as the spirit)-'Seek to know that self.' That this was no alien creed to Vardhamana we can see surviving in the Jain scriptures centuries latter: 'A wise man who knows that women are a slough, as it were, will get no harm from them, but will wander searching for the self'. I have nowhere seen noticed the interesting parallel there is herewith the first public injunction recorded as given by the Founder of Buddhism: 'What have you, gentlemen to do with a woman? Were it not better that you sought thoroughly after the self?' Both records clearly hint both teachers were followers of the Brahaman teaching of Immance. Yet both teachers as such, set on foot a line of reformed teaching, not running counter to Immance, but supplying in which they deemed it lacking. And there has come to me that which claims to tell what this was.
This: that those two reform movements sprang up, not in the region known as Central, the desa where Brahamanism was strongest and best, but further east, east of where Delhi now stands, in the land alleged by scholars to be, as to Brahman teaching, more corrupt, does not invalidate the need of making clear what was calling for reform. The local conditions may have made reform yet more needed; that is all.
* Vidya, April, 1987
