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Individual and Society in Jainism
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of objects can be observed. It is, of course, meritorious to practice charity wherever our heart is moved to compassion. It is meritorious to build Panjrapoles for the relief of poor, sick animals; it is meritorious to provide the poor hungry with bread, people suffering from cold with clothes, and homeless ones with a roof over their heads; still nothing can come up to the service done to a poor pious brother in Mahāvīra. The more he comes up to the ideal laid down in the Scriptures, the higher is considered to be the merit of serving him. This explains the remarkable zeal with which one can see Śrāvakas (laymen) hasten to feast a brother Jaina, especially on the day when the latter breaks a fast of long duration, and it accounts for the readiness with which a Jaina community or Jaina institution hastens to receive and to give facilities even to a foreign scholar who happens to be a student of Jainism, and whose learned activity in connection with Jainism is considered to be an undoubted religious merit. And it explains, last but not least, the unspeakable pleasure and devotion with which a Jaina family sees approaching towards their door the saintly monk or nun, who will enter with the greeting of “Dharmalābha”or a similar formula, and will allow the lord or lady of the house to put a small quantity of eatables into their bowl, provided that this action includes no direct or indirect injury to anybody, and that everything is in strictest accordance with the rules of monastic conduct and decency.
Now I have been asked several times whether it is true that the Jainas as alleged carry the virtue of charity so for as to cause, now and them, some poor wretch, whom they pay off, to yield his body as pasture-ground for lice and fleas and other amiable creatures, and let them have their fill. According to my firm conviction, this horrible allegation must be a bold invention. And if it is perhaps, against all probability, true that some ill-informed fanatic did such a thing, then he would have acted in straight opposition to the tenets of Jainism : for to make a being so highly developed as a human soul
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