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Lord Mahavira's Religious Contemporaries and Sects
171
ETHICS
Both the Buddhists and the Jainas regarded the Ājivikas as amoralists and proceeded to condemn them as immoral in practice. On the evidence of Jaina scriptures, A.F.R. Hoernlel accuses Gośāla of hypocrisy and incontinence.
B.M. BARUA? on the other hand considers these strictures merely sectarian. According to him, Gośāla's theory of Parināmavāda seeks to establish even with the help of its fatalistic creed a moral government of law in the universe where nothing is dead, where nothing happens by chance, and where all that is and all that happens and is experienced are unalterably fixed as it were by a pre-determined law of nature.
It teaches that as man is pre-destined in certain ways and as he stands highest in the gradations of existence, his freedom, to be worth the name, must be one within the operation of law, and that the duty of man as the highest of beings is to conduct himself according to law, and to act and behave in a manner that does not induce him to trespass upon the riglits of others, to make the fullest use of one's liberties, to be considerate and discreet, to be pure in life, to abstain from killing living beings, to be free from carthly possessions, to reduce the necessaries of life to a minimum, and to strive for thic best and highest, i.e., Jinaliood, which is within human powers.
This fatalistic creed, which is a logical outcome of Parināmavāda, confirms popular Indian belief that action has its reward and retribution and that heaven and liell arc ilic incvitable conscqucnccs hereafter of merits and demcrits of this life.3
AJITIKA DOCTRINE VIS-1-17S THE YIG:1.VTHAS
Apart from those relating to practice, the chief differences between the Ajsvikas and the Niganthas concerned the nature of will and of the soul. s ro 1)ic latter. Buddhaghosha
1. Err, 1, pp. 263-265. 2. Burir Jil, II, pp. 12-13. 3. Ibid, pp. 317-31S.
