Religious Problem in India

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

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THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN INDIA
female ascetics to visit all the Jaina honseholds, and to see that the Jaina women, the wives and the daughters, are properly educated, properly instructed. They lay great stress on the education of the women, and one great work of the female ascetie is to give that education and to see that it is carried out. There is a point that I think the Hindu might well borrow from the Jaina, so that the Hindu women might be tanght withont the chance of losing their ancestral faith, or suffering interference with their own religion, taught by ascetics of their own creed. Surely no vocation can be nobler, surely it would be an advantage to Hinduism.
And then how is the ascetic to die? By starvation. He is not to wait until death touches him; but when he has reached that point where in that body lie can make no further progress, when he has reached that limit of the body, he is to put it aside and pass ont of the world by death by voluntary starvation.
Such is a brief and most imperfect account of a noble religion, of a great faith which is practically, we may say, on almost all points, at one with the Hindū; and so much is this the case that in Northern India the Jaina and the Hindu Vaishyas intermarry and interdine. They do not regard themselves as of different religions, and in the Hindu College we have Jaina students, Jaina boarders, who live with their Hindi brothers, and are thus from the time of childlhood helping to draw closer and closer together the bonds of love and of brotherhood. I spoke to you yesterday about nation building, and reminded you