Lord Mahavira and His Teachings

Author(s): Vallabhsuri Smarak Nidhi
Publisher: Vallabhsuri Smarak Nidhi

Page 88

Lord Mahavira and His Teachings
Indian Culture. The fact that a small mirority of Jainas, not exceeding one and a half million, is submerged among the hundreds of millions of Hindus, should not close our eyes to the significance of Jaina Philosophy for the origins of Indian Thought.
Mahāvīra, the 24th Tīrthankara, is now recognized as one of the greatest thinkers of Ancient India, the equal of the Buddha in virtue of his profundity and his character. The contamporaneity of the two greatest sages of Ancient India is accepted as a historic fact: the two lived in the same 6th Century before Christ, in the same province of Magadha, preaching in the same towns and villages, at Rājagļha and Vaiśāli. They must have met and exchanged ideas according to all psychological probabilities, although we do not possess textual evidence concerning their personal relations.
The objective analysis of Mahāvīra's and Buddha's Thought shows the many common points which characterize Jainism and Buddhism. Ahiṁsā and Nirvāņa are concepts which belong to both systems. If we go deeply into the origins of these concepts, we are bound to accept the Jaina Tradition as the source of these specific aspects of Indian Thought. Jainism with its pre-historic background and its 24 Tirthankaras preceded Buddhism by several centuries, although we cannot accept Jaina mythology which obscured the history of the community. Nevertheless the historicity not only of Mahāvīra, but of Pārsva, the 23rd Tirthankara, who lived 250 years before Mahāvīra, in the 8th century before Christ, the very century which gave birth to the first authentic Upa