Religious Problem in India

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophist Office Adyar

Page 52

THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN INDIA
cession that followed him, and plunges alone into the jungle. There for twelve years He practises great austerities, striving to realise Himself and to realise the nothingness of all things but the Self; and in the thirteenth year illumination breaks upon Him, and the light of the Self shines forth upon Him, and the knowledge of the Supreme becomes His own. He shakes off the bonds of Avidyā and becomes the omniscient, the all-knowing; and then He comes forth as Teacher to the world, teaching for fortytwo years of perfect life.
Of the teachings we are here told practically nothing; the names of some disciples are given; but the life, the incidents, these are all omitted. It is as though the feeling that all this is illnsion, it is nothing, it is naught, lad passed into the records of the Teacher, so as to make the onter teaching as nothing, the Teacher Himself as nothing. And then He dies after forty-two years of labor, at Pāpā 326 years before the birth of Christ. Not very much, you see, to say about the Lord Malāvira ; but His life and work are shown in the philosophy that He left, in that which He gave to the world, though the personality is practically ignored.
Before him, 1,200 years, we are told, was the twenty-third of the Tīrųhankaras, and then, 84,000 years before Him, the twenty-second, and so on backwards and backwards in the long scroll of time, until at last we come to the first of These, Rishabhadeva, the father of King Bharata, who gave to India its name. There the two faiths, Jainism and