Mahavira Jain Vidyalaya Rajat Jayanti Mahotsava

Author(s): Mahavir Jain Vidyalaya Mumbai
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay

Page 189

SILVER JUBILEEJ
DATES OF TIRTHAMKARAS
25
to some extent so as regards the state of knowledge in the nineteenth century
when Dr. Bühler set the above limit. The real reason, to my mind, is that ? no one has cared to examine the new materials that have become available now.
4. The attempt to be made should not be confined to an investigation of the material facts regarding the life of each of those preceding Tirthamkaras about whom such facts can be gathered from the Jaina works alone but it should be extended further and tested by a comparison with the similar facts, if any, that can be gathered from the works of the early Bhăgawata school, which, I have reasons to believe, is an outcome as much of a protest against the doctrine of attaining Swarga by animal sacrifices and looking upon that as the summum bonum of life, as the Jaina and Buddhist schools. The doctrine that salvation consists not in multiplying the means of sensual enjoym this world and the next but in releasing the individual soul from the cycle of births and deaths, which is the result of the operation of the inflexible law of Karma and the source of miseries of diverse sorts, and that the way to secure it is to acquire complete control over one's emotions by the practice of Yaugic exercises, for which a life of seclusion is essential, is common to all of theni. What they differed in was in the interpretation of the law of Karma, the earlier Bhagawatas believing that the law is subordinate to the will of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, who can be pleased by love and whose visible embodiment in the age of the Kuru-Pandus was Sri Krşņa while the predecessors of the Jainas and the Buddhists believing that it operated automatically like the other scientific laws. I am not prepared to say when the predecessors of the Buddhists may have first formed their own separate group. However, so far as the predecessors of the Bhagawatas and the Jainas are concerned, I feel myself in a position to say that very likely they separated when Dwaipāyana Vyāsa propounded his doctrine of Karma-Yoga by composing the Bhagawad-gita and the kernel of the Mahabharata, in both of which Kệsna-Vasudeva has been identified with the Saguna Brahma of the Upanisads and his adoration by Nişkäma Karma is acclaimed as the easiest way for the attainment of freedom from the trammels of sarnsära and as regards Karma emphasis is laid on the proper observance of the Varnadharma. This must have occurred in the time of Aristanemi, the twenty-second Tirthamkara, because according to Jaina accounts he had broken off his family ties and betaken himself to a secluded place during the life-time of Kişna and Dwaipāyana Vyása is said therein to be responsible for the destruction of Dwarka and is abused right and left as the enemy of the Yådavas. As against Krsna personally the Jaina have no griev