________________
1
The Heritage of the Last Arhat Mahāvira
-Charlotte Krause
Relativity of Religious Truth
By birth and education, every one of us has been placed within the sphere of power of one or another of the great human civilizations, which exercised its influence on our bodily and mental triaining, and on the whole development of our personality, and even impressed on the mind of the majority, the stamp of its particular religious dogma. Strengthened by history, tradition, custom and convention, this network of influences fettered the individual nearly as firmly as those bonds of kinship do, that connect him with the race of his ancestors.
Still, as those bonds of kinship do not hinder a person from attaching himself with even stronger bonds, bonds of love and friendship, bonds of fellowship and mental affinity, to other, distant persons, just so that other bondage must not keep anybody back from glancing around himself, discovering merits in heterogeneous religions, and measuring his own conceptions by the noblest of theirs.
But then how to judge of the merit of a religion, how to know what is noble in it? Is not one single religion, isolated from its sister-religions, like the isolated petal of a flower, the isolated note of a melody. Is it not, in its onesidedness, comparable to the opinion of a single one of that group of blind men, who, standing before an elephant for the first time in their lives, tried to define its nature. The first, who happened to touch its forehead, declared the elephant to be a big stone; the second, from the touch of one of its tusks, defined it as a pointed weapon; the third, after touching the trunk, said the elephant was a leather bag; the fourth caught hold of one of the ears, and defined the whole animal as a flapping fan; the fifth, after passing his hand over its body, declared it to
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
