Outlines of Jaina Philosophy

Author(s): Mohanlal Mehta
Publisher: Jain Mission Society Bangalore

Page 14

The invocation which every pious Jain repeats daily, bowing to East, West. South, North, is this:
I bow to the Arhats. I bow to the Siddhas. I bow to the Acharyas. I bow to the Upadhyayas. I bow to all the Sadhus in the world.
And in the Avash yaka Sutra there is this prayerful submission: "I forgive all souls. Let all souls forgive me. I am in friendship with all. With none I am in enmity."
The Jains have in common with the Zoroastrians and the Buddhists a tradition of a long line of Enlightened Ones. Guides and Teachers of mankind. These Tirthankaras belonged to the Kshatriva caste and yet they taught, age after age, the philosophy of Yon-Violence. Round Ahinsa the entire body of Jain doctrines revolves. The Bij, the seed, of the moral philosophy of Jainism is in the single sentence of the Sutra Kritanga that by harming no creature a man reaches the Great Peace of Enlightenment.
Twenty-three of these Jinas or Tirthankaras are recognized and these stretch far back of Vardhamana, the 24th and last, more widely known as Mahavira, the Man of Dauntless Energy, who lived in the 6th century B.C. This was the great age when not only Gautaina Buddha taught in India, but also Lao-Tzu and Confucius in China, the last of the Zarathushtras in Iran, and Pythagoras in Greece Some information about the Cyclic Appearance of these 24 Tirthankaras and Their achievements is to be found in the Kalpa Sutra of the Jain Canon They are the Awakened Ones who "preach the unparalleled Wisdom."
Taking as his theme the doctrine of Jain philosophy, it is natural that Shri Mehta's approach should be the intellectual one. No adequate consideration of Jainism, however, can ignore its lofty ethics The ethical teachings are to be found in these scholarly pages under the more technically philosophical headings.
Jain ethics is perhaps the most valuable contribution which Jainism can make to modern thought.
How greatly the modern world would profit, for example, by adopting the attitude of Syadvada, with its open-minded recognition that judgments resting on different points of view may differ without any of them being wholly wrong!
legitimate corollary of this doctrine of the relativity of judgment, to which Shri Mehta devotes a chapter, would seem to be that, as between religions also, the complete truth can be found only in their combined views, after that which is false in each of them has been sifted out. The serious comparison of the ancient world religions is sure to yield universal ethics and truths common to them all.
The special mission of the Jains of today, in this respect, is a dual one: (1) Not only should there be respectful tolerance of other creeds and