Santbal A Saint with a Difference

Author(s): T U Mehta
Publisher: Navjivan Prakashan Mandir

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to dispose of your dead, and how to settle as an organised society. He is also said to have taught the methods of agriculture and invented an alphabet called "Brahmi". All these activities of various Tirthankars were the activities for social amelioration.
One argument is that one can do all these things of social importance before renouncing the world, but not after renouncing the same. Any such argument is liable to be rejected summarily as totally devoid of merits. If a Shravak who remains active in the society can take active interest, of course without any attachment, and still obtain Moksha (freedom from Karmic bondage), it is difficult to understand why a saint cannot do so. "Renouncement" of worldly affairs only means renouncement of attachment to the worldly affairs. Affairs themselves do not bind you; what binds you is the attachment.
Let us look at the whole problem from another angle. How can you know that you are developing your "Charitra" (character), which is considered in Jain philosophy a third jewel in our life, unless you are constantly testing your mental reactions to the problems of life? If you renounce worldly currents of life and go to a lonely place for life, you are divorced from the life's vicissitudes. The blessed isolation in a lonely place cannot train your mind to keep proper balance in times of distress and difficulties because these are absent in your isolation. Thus if you are isolated from the society your mind does not get any training. But the human mind always remains active and hence in absence of proper training it gets distorted. It is only when you are associated with worldly currents, that you can test and know how far you have been able to keep it detached from hate, anger, avarice and attachment of all sorts. If you are honest and sincere in achieving spiritual heights, you can train your mind in achieving not only "Dharma Dhyan" but also the process of "Shukla Dhyan". Thus for a saint, to remain alive to world he lives in, is a good training ground for the achievement of spiritual
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