Studies in South Indian Jainism

Author(s): M S Ramaswami Ayyangar, B Seshagiri Rao
Publisher: M S Ramaswami Ayyangar

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SPREAD OF JAINISM.
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to have been inspired with new ideals and literature, enriched with new forms and expressions." A knowledge of the then, Dravidian methods and forms of worship would easily make us understand why Jainism had taken root in the soil. The Dravidian had developed a civilization of his own. His religion consisted in sacrifices, prophecies, ecstatic dances and demonworship. This was open to the attacks of the first batch of Brahmin immigrants from the north whc. settled at Madura and other cities and tried to introduce Hindu notions of caste and ceremonial but met with much opposition, the caste system, then being inchoate and imperfect. Nevertheless, the Brahmins succeeded in introducing their notions of religion. Sacrifices were performed under royal patronage and horses or cows were sacrificed with elaborate ceremonies, the flesh of the victims, not being disdained by the Brahmins.1 Though anxious to spread vedic religion among the masses, the Brahmin kept the Vedas a sealed book to them. As in the north of India, so in the south, the non-Aryan races began to cultivate a contempt for the Brahmins whose worship of the elements did not find favour with the masses. It was at this period that the nonBrahminic orders, Jainism and Buddhism, entered the country, and no wonder that these, with their less complex, forms of worship and
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1 Kanakasabhai Pillai, Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago, p. 230.