Religion and Culture of the Jains

Author(s): Jyoti Prasad Jain
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 52

CHAPTER IV
THE DOCTRINE
The doctrinal basis of Jainism comprises metaphysis and ontology, cosmology and cosmography, theology and mythology, epistemology and psychology, logic and dialecties, ethics and ritual-in short all that goes to make a well-developed comprehensive philosophical and religious system. It presents a happy blending of unavoidable dogmatical postulates and logical speculations. It is a metaphysical realism, an ontological optimism, a spiritual idealism, a philosophical non-absolutism, an ethical puritanism and psychological rationalism. It discourages superstition and blind faith, and encourages free rational thinking. Jainism is not a revealed religion and claims no divine origin, but was expounded by those supermen who had, by undergoing a course of regorous self-discipline and spiritual purification, known and experienced the reality, realised the truth, practised the path and achieved the goal.
Dharma
In Jainism, the term dharma is the nearest approach to what we understand by the word 'religion'. It has, however, a twofold connotation: primarily it means 'the nature of thing', that is, the essential, inherent, nature of thing--of everything, animate or inanimate, that exists-is the 'dharma' of that thing; and secondarily it connotes the means or the path by pursuing which that essential or inherent nature is realised or achieved. In other words dharma is that which leads, binds, or takes