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Vardhamana Mahâvîra
129
hear a voice as it were within which said: 'Man needs the very more in the will in effort, if he is to become what he can become. Word effort: I believed that man was in more than one word, and that he would return to earth again in a More will to word the new he had come to learn.
I came in time to hear of other men, two or three, also wanting to teach that which they found lacking in the current teaching of Imanence, but they had not kept in view the More that is in man, and I found them worthless. They taught a Less in man, his being not real, his turning to monkhood, and they thus tended to keep man in the Less. I too had the will to leave the world, and I have been shown as having done this. It was then a new idea; that the world a man could get quicker to the More in himself.
'Monasticism was not always in Indian life. Brahmans left the world when elderly, but not the man of other classes, let alone before he was elderly. Man had work to do, food to get, and he would have been much blamed had he left the world when still strong. But the idea was beginning to take hold of men that they should leave the world early, and not only if they were Brahmins. This may have been due to the cult of Imanence, for in that it saw a More in man, it showed him to himself as in a way the Highest, he could be only concerned with the highest things if he would be true to his nature. He was world forsaker in order to be one who had become Brahman so far as he yet could.
'Now men of other new messages were as such welcome to me till I found I could not rate highly their departures. Then, when I was already elderly, I hear of the men of the Sakyas (Buddhists). They did not approve of Tapas, and this made my followers unwilling to welcome them. I wanted to meet their leader, who as I hear, accepted Imanance-teaching about the man, but held that the one thing needful in it was that man should not be held as being, nor as not being, but as becoming. I tried to see him, but failed, for the men in my company were silent about his movements, and so we never met. I valued their care of me, but I was a care of the sect, not of the man. I was then in weaker health and could no longer go on tour. Will was there but not the strength. The much tapas had weakened me prematurely. And Gautama did not know how I wished to see him.
In the scriptures compiled by Gautam's men of a later date,
