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Historical Evaluation of the Ancient Jaina Texts
Idol-worship and each advocating the necessity of an attitude of devotion (bhakti) towards its chosen deity which it declared to be the supreme deitycame to be fostered within the fold of Brahmanism All these sects held out to their adherents the prospect of a success in worldly endeavours now and a cessation of the transmigratory cycle in the end The same sort of influences affected Buddhism as well But in this case idol-worship took a rather round-about course Of course, nothing new was offered to the monk, but the lay-follower of Buddhism was asked to pay homage to the stupas (funerary mounds) erected in the honour of holy men Thus devoted circumambulation around a Buddhist stupa promised to a Buddhistic layman almost all that devoted worship of a Brahmanical temple deity did to a Brahmanist layman For some time Buddha in an anthropomorphic form was not made an object cf worship - so much so that even sculptured reliefs decorating the exterior of a stupa would, in the case of need (as for example, while depicting a Jataka story), represent Buddha in a symbolic rather than anthropomorphic form But soon enough the attitude was given up and the anthropomorphic representation of Buddha began to find place in Buddhist sanctuaries Nay, the Buddhist now chose to worship not one Buddha but the numerous ones - and the numerous Bodhisattvas in addition Thus the second stage in the evolution of Indian religious thought culminates in a phase where almost the only thing that distinguishes a Buddhist layman from his Brahmanist counterpart was the name of the deity worshipped But that was after all a minor distinction, and in that respect even one Buddhist layman might differ from another or one Brahmanist layman from another By the end of this stage Brahmanism received its classical form - its standard 'Puranic' form and it is in this form that it made all subsequent progress which was fairly considerable For Buddhism inspite of - perhaps because of-ita Tantric innovations (which too had their Brahmanical counterpart but of meagre significance) was now definitely on the downgrade and gradually left the scene for good
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It is in this background that we have to assess the vicissitudes undergone by Jainism as a religious sect An enquiry into the origins of Jainism 18 a matter of much controversy and much idle speculation and let us not enter into that Instead it will be profitable to establish on the basis of the tangible evidence at hand a relative chronology of the several trends exhibited by the corpus of Jaina tenets as we find it today Thus certain texts throw significant light on the motives that impel one to embrace monkhood The problem is of the first-rate importance and was in a way touched upon also by the Buddhists when they, in the course of elaborating the fourfold Noble Truths, contended that desire is at the root of all one's worldly miseries the implication being that a monk's life of destrelessness is an
