Religious Problem in India

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

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THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN INDIA
ignored. Singing stotras to Mahādeva they came, chanting His praises, especially working cures of diseases in His name, and before these wonderful cures and the rush of the devotion which was aroused by their singing and preaching, many of the Jainas were themselves converted; the remainder of them were driven away, so that in Southern India they became practically non-existent. Such is their story in the South; such the fashion of their vanishing.
In Rājputāna, however, they remained, and so highly were they respected that Akbar, the magnanimous Musulmān Emperor, issued an edict that no animals should be killed in the neighbourhood of Jaina temples.
The Jaina are divided, we may add, into two great sects—the Digambaras, known in the 4th century B. C., and mentioned in one of Ashoka's edicts; the Sveļambaras, apparently more modern. The latter are now by far the more numerous, but it is said that the Digambaras possess far vaster libraries of ancient literature than does the rival sect.
Leave that historical side ; let us now turn to their philosophic teaching. They assert two fundamental existences, the root, the origin, of all that is, of Sansāra ; these are uncreated, eternal. One is Jiva or ātmā, pure conscionsness, knowledge, the Knower, and when the Jiva has transcended Avidlyā, ignorance, then he realises himself as the pure kuowledge that he is by nature, and is manifested as the Knower of all that is. On the other hand Dravya, substance, that which is knowable; the knower and the knowable