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Individual and Society in Jainism
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And then, say the wise, whether you hanker for its gain, or trouble for its preservation : all this happiness you are so particular about, means slavery in the last end. The anxiety you feel about it, fills you mind, and mars your thinking morn till night, so that, if you continuous worrying about business, your position, your hobbies, your friends, your pleasures and your wife and children, you do not find so much time as to ask yourself why you are doing all that, why do you live, what you live for, and where you are steering to. Do you think that you do not care to ponder over it. But in reality you are not free to do so, because you are the slave of your attachment to that empty, transient bit of happiness, which is in reality, no happiness at all. Would it not be much better for you to be unconnected with all this, to be your own mind prepared to be, like the Rșis and Munis of old, who, in their meditations, unhampered by secular consideration, without comfort and property, without wife and children, without ambition and position, were in reality, the lords of the world.
arthānāmarjane duḥkhamarjitānār ca rakṣaṇel āye duḥkhaṁ vyaui duḥkhas dhig dravyar duḥkhavardhanamll apāyabahulas pāpaṁ ye parityajya saṁśritāḥ| tapovanaṁ mahāstāste dhanyāste tapasvinaḥ||
“The acquisition of property, and if acquired, its preservation, both are connected with trouble. There is trouble in earning, and trouble in spending. Therefore, cursed be property the increaser of unhappiness.”
"Blessed are those ascetics, great souls are those ascetics who have given up sin, the producer of so much suffering, who have found a place of refuge in the grove of a hermitage.
It is not without reason that people in India have preferred giving to such “great souls” titles like "Svāimī,” “Mahārāja and others, which in olden times, were applicable only to truly renouncing
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