Sannyasa Dharma

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 13

restraint needs no comment from me beyond this, that as in physical culture over-exertion will be productive of strain and fatigue, and under-exertion will lead to no good results, in the same way with the training of the will one must exert oneself to one's full capacity, avoiding both the over-straining of excess and the ineffeciuality of shirking.
Even among the Christians of the second cen. tury this moral discipline was carried out under systematic rules. .
" It was not left to a student's option. He must undergo
hardships, drinking water rather than wine, sleeping on the ground rather than on a bed : and sometimes even subjecting himsell to ansterities ..." (Ibid. pp. 145-149).
This is, indeed, the ancient (loctrine ; it is certainly as old as Religion itself, which means nothing if not the attainment of Divine Perfection by the complete eradication of the lusts and appetites apper. taining to embodied existence. This practical aspect of Religion was not kept in view as seriously and vigorously elsewhere as in India ; but even in coun. tries like Greece, which have not produced any true ascetics, philosophers tried to carry out the principle of renunciation in their lives. We learn from Dr. Hatch that Pythagoras had founded an ascetic school (Ibid. 151).* Dr. Hatch also quotes Dio Chrysostom, who says (1bid, 151):
" The life of one who practises philosophy is different from that of
the mass of men; the very dress of such a one is different from that of ordinary men, and his bed and exercise and baths and all the rest of his living. A man who in none of these respects differs from the rest must be put down as one of them, though he declare and profess that he is a philosopher before all Athens or
Megara, or in the presence of the Lacedaemonian kings."..... * See also the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. IX, p. 859,