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Individual and Society in Jainism
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the above two factors must allow us to judge the merit of the religion by which it is being vouched for.
Measured by this standard, there can be no question as to the high value of Jainism, that time-honoured religion, which goes back to the teachings of Vardhamānā Mahāvīra, the great contemporary and countryman of Gautama Buddha, and to his predecessors, for its teachings seem to guarantee indeed "the greatest happiness of the greatest number” not only of men, but of living beings, under all circumstances imaginable. This is why I make bold to draw the attention of the reader on this extraordinarily fascinating and important subject to-day.
According to Jainism, everything that lives, has got a soul, or to speak in the beautiful concise language of the Scriptures, is a soul. And all the souls are fellow-creatures : the god-like recluse in his purity and unshakable peace, the active man of the world with his never-resting ambitions, the innocent infant and the criminal, the lion and the nightingale, the cobra and the dragon-fly, the green lcaf and the rose flower, the tiniest particle of water and the smallest of the corpuscles that compose the shining crystal, each of those myriads of beings that form the wings of the breeze, and of those that waver in the scarlet glow of fire : all are fellow-creatures, all are brothers. For all have got bodies, all have got senses, all have got instincts, all take food and digest it, all multiply, all are born and die, all are capable of suffering and enjoying, and all bear the germs of perfection within themselves. That means, all are able to develop, during the long chain of their respective existences subsequent to one another, their innate dispositions of perception, knowledge, activity, and joy, to a degree of highest perfection. And all find themselves placed in the middle of the struggle against “Karma”.
"Karma" designates that substance which we incessantly assimilate by our bodily and mental activity, and which remains latent in the depths of our personality, until it “ripcns” at the critical moment,
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