Study in the Origins and Development of Jainism

Author(s): S N Shrivastava
Publisher: Rekha Publication Gorakhpur

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Origin, Antiquity
The changes in the socio-economic structures during the first half of the first millenium B.C. exercised profound impact on the mind of the thinkers of the time. Old Vedic sacrificial religion was subjected to criticism. A new ideological perspective came into being which rejected the older explanations of life and universe. This ideological perspective keeping in with the basic changes in the material and social life of the period developed in the teachings of what came to be called the heterodox sects."? Scholars, while attributing the emergence of the Sramanic sects to this changed historical contexts, have delineated their views differently. A. L. Bãsham. for example, thinks that this 'stirring of thought, which produced first the early Upanişads and then the numerous heterodox systems of which Buddhism was the chief, seems to have been in some way connected with the belief in transmigration". 23 It has also been stated that 'the craving for salvation, which seems to have possessed many of the minds at the time of the Buddha, must have sprang from a deepseated fear of change and a profound sense of insecurity". 24 The process of breaking of the tribal oligarchies during the life-time of the Buddha, or soon after, added to this fear of change and sense of insecurity. This prepared the ground of the origin and development of the new ideologies which, though propagated by men of kshatriya stock, appealed to the emerging new classes.25 The material condition of flux created an ideological atmosphere in which permanence could no more be feasible or possible. An alternative system was to be envisaged which would subsume changing material conditions and yet remain viable26. In this context attention has also been drawn to the despondence and despair in the urban life of the Gangetic valley which ultimately resulted into pessimistic world view.
Upani şads are also regarded to have been the springhead of Śramanism. The latter is said to be a degeneration of the Upanişadic philosophy.??