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The Path of Arhat : A Religious Democracy
beginning to realize its ethical responsibility to itself. 'Kattarameva Anujāi Kamma'l, meaning 'actions ( Karmas ) follow the doer', said the Jaina philosophers. This developes and fixes the ethics of responsibility for the self to strive by its own efforts to get itself free from the karmic bondage. Search for Responsibility and śramaņa Line
Man's search for fixing the responsibility for experiences like pleasures, pains, enjoyment, suffering, incongruences and incompatibilities, inequities and injustices sufferred by human beings and other species of existence in this universe has never reached such sophisticated depths as found in Jaina philosophy. Easiest explanation available to man was God-either personal or impersonal. Early Aryans was a race possessing great intellectual potentiality and dynamism. Even they in their Vedas could not go beyond propitiating different Gods supposed to master different forces of nature to win their favour and to protect them against violence of nature and enemies. This propitiation naturally invited plenty of rituals in form of animal and sometimes even human sacrifices. All rituals give birth to a priestly class and theoretic specialisation. A priestly class of Brahmin's sprang up, and as has happened elsewhere in the world, this class acquired a good hold and influence even on the political forces with the result that the whole social and economic structure of the country came to be under the sway of politico-religious domination. Priestly class gradually began to lose faith, and there was a sort of intellectual revolt. 'Brāhmaṇas'-a literature prescribing in great details the ceremonies for different types of 'Yajñas' to propitiate gods, came to be replaced by 'Upanişadas' giving rational interpretations to Vedas and the science of sacrifices ( Yajñas ). Śramaņa line of thoughts, which was pre-Aryan and pre-Vedic, must have had a great deal of influence on the thinking of the great Rşis of the time and they seem to have borrowed new ideas of the 'Real Essence and called it a
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TITĀT 3TTFTTS #F#', Uttaradhyayana-Sūtra, 13/23.
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