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CHAPTER V
LORD MAHĀVĪRA'S RELIGIOUS CONTEMPORARIES
AND CONTEMPORARY SECTS
The age of Lord Mahävira (6th century B.C.) was of far-reaching religious reformist activities not only in India but also throughout the ancient world. It was an age of enlightenment for the human race. The materialistic interpretation of history would attribute this change in human consciousness to a change in social milieu. The idealist historiography would see here an unfoldment of the spirit or the progress of thought through its autonomous dialectic. Suddenly and almost simultaneously and almost certainly independently, there started religious movements at separate centres of civilization. Zoroaster gave a new creed to Iran; Confucius and Loa-tse taught in China; the Jews in their Babylonian captivity developed their tenacious faith in Jehova, and the Sophists in Greece began tackling the problems of life.
Even in India, this was an age of freedom of thought which gave rise to new religious movements and brought about radical changes for the better in the old ones. The Samaññaphala Sutta and the Brahmajāla Sutta in the Digha Nikāya of the Buddhists mention about sixty-three different philosophical schools-probably all of them non-Brāhmaṇa existing at the time of Buddha. In the Sūtrakṣitānga, Bhagavati, etc., of the Jainas, we find a far larger number of such heretical schools. These statements about the number of sects may have been influenced by the tendency to exaggerate which was widespread in ancient India. We should not assume that they were independent religious sects or schools because these are distinguished only by very subtle and minor differences in matters of doctrine and practice. It is not possible today to prove once for all that all these sects originated at the same time. Some of them may have owed their origin to a time far more remote than that of Mahavira.
