Prolegomena to Prakritica et Jainica

Author(s): Satyaranjan Banerjee
Publisher: Asiatic Society

Page 94

SEN: SCHOOLS AND SECTS IN JAIN LITERATURE
77
The Parable of the Lotus-pool is an important chapter in which the views of some of the leading schools have been stated.
There was a lotus-pool containing much water and mud, full of white lotuses, delightful and magnificent. In the very middle of this lotus-pool grew one big white lotus. Now there came from each of the four quarters a man proud of his own abilities and attempted to fetch the big white lotus. To each of them as he proceeded the water and mud seemed to extend, so that he could neither reach the white lotus nor return to the bank and was stuck in the mud. Then came a restrained monk who called aloud standing on the bank and the big white lotus flew to him. Mahāvīra narrated this story and asked his disciples if they understood the meaning of the simile and on their answering in the negative explained that the lotus-pool meant the world, the water meantkarman, the mud meant pleasures, the lotuses meant people in general, the big white lotus meant the king, the four men meant the heretics, the monk meant the Law, the bank meant the Order, and the monk's voice meant the preaching of the Law, and the big lotus flying up meant nirvāņa. Different teachers went to the king to teach him but only the Nirgrantha ascetic succeeded.
One of these four teachers, an Ajīviya, states his doctrines as follows :
There are two kinds of men, one admits and another does not admit action. Both are alike, their case is the same because they are actuated by the same force. An ignorant man thinks of the case as follows: “When I suffer, grieve, blame myself, grow feeble, am afflicted or undergo punishment, I have caused it; or when another man suffers, etc., he has caused it.” Thus an ignorant man thinks himself or another to be the cause of what he or the other man experiences. A wise man thinks about the cause as follows: "When I suffer I did not cause it or when another man suffers he did not cause it. By the will of fate