Religion and Culture of the Jains

Author(s): D C Sirkar
Publisher: University of Calcutta

Page 20

THE PRIMITIVE IN JAINISM L. B. Keny, St. Xavier's College, Bombay University
“The genius of the people of India”, says Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson, "does not lie in historical research; to them metaphysical thought is the chief end of man, and they are content to leave to western scholars the task of filling in the large gaps of unexplored country in their history." "It is”, she continues, “the misfortune of Jainism that so much of its life story falls within these unexplored tracts of time, and though the Jainas have kept historical records of their own, it is very difficult to correlate these records with known facts in the world's history."1 In this paper an attempt is made to challenge as well as to refute the statement of Mrs. Stevenson.
The Indian legends are not totally detached from Indian historical traditions. The Jain legends, therefore, contain latent historical facts though they are mixed up with traditions. The Jains respect their twenty-four Tirthankaras, the first being Rşabhadeva and the last Vardhamāna. The traditional account of the Jains reflects a miserable ignorance of time and space, though it may be that they indicate their hoary past and therefore refer to the primitive state of their civilization.
Referring to the duration of the interval between the different prophets, the Jains start with '50 lakhs of crores of of sāgara' of time between Rşabhadeva and Ajitanātha, the second prophet. The later Tirthankaras, however, have considerably a shorter span of interval between them ; c.g., 45 lakhs of years' between the 19th and 20th Tirthankaras. The change from sāgara to 'years' it very significant. The change reflects a primitive concept of time to a civilized one.
Like the primitive concept of the time factor, the Jain tradition reflects a primitive concept of measurement. It is a
1 The Heart of Jainism, p. 7.