Mahavira and his Teaching

Author(s): C C Shah, Rishabhdas Ranka, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Bhagwan Mahavir 2500th Nirvan Mahotsava Samiti

Page 318

THE ASCENDENCY & ECLIPSE OF BHAGAVĀN MAHĀVĪRA’S CULT 311
He was a staunch Jaina before, and for some time after, he ascended the throne. The degenerate state of the then Buddhistic monasticism and Tantric Hinduism had turned his mind to the non-violent self-denying puritanism of Bhagawan Mahāvīra's cult. His aesthetic turn of mind prompted him to excavate caves with stone-beds in them for the residence of Jaina ascetics in many inaccessible rock-retreats. His love of art induced him to inscribe a whole treatise on music on a rock in the Pudukkottah state. He composed two dramatic satires too in Sanskrit and had them performed by professional actors and actresses during temple festivals. In both, he caricatured decadent Hinduism and degenerate Buddhism.
36. The targets of attack on monasticism all over the world had always been the ubiquitous mendicant and the weak-willed nun. In his 'Mattavilāsa-Prahasana', Mahendra Vikrama Pallava caricatured a drunken kāpālika mendicant, walking hand in had with an equally drunken nun-friend of his on the streets of Kāñci. They fell out with a decadent Buddhist monk, who had been eyeing the nun with amrous envy. In his second farce, 'Bhagavad-Ajjukīyam', he illustrated the ludicrousness of a prostitute preaching Buddhist philosophy and of a Buddhist monk reciting love-poems! Though written in Sanskrit, both the pieces reflected 7th century cultural decadence, of all religious sects, except Jainism.
37. 'Manimekhalai', the Buddhist Tamil epic, not only inadvertently reveals that the Buddhist pontiffs and their agents sought out and admitted rich, attractive and accomplished courtesans into their monasteries, but also takes pride in declaring that they admitted even fallen women into them. It ridicules the puritan cruelty of the Jaina church in expelling such characters. Popular imagination is such that even a single case of sexual lapse in a nun or monk, even under extreme duress, will be exaggerated so as to condemn the whole community of hermits. Buddhism was, therefore, the first casualty in the conflict between Hindu renaissance and non-Hindu monasticism.