Unknown Pilgrims

Author(s): N Shanta
Publisher: Sri Satguru Publications Delhi

Page 33

Presentation
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5. The importance of this study for our times
The reader may perhaps find the themes here treated interesting but somewhat bizarre and in any case of secondary importance to an age such as ours, which is preoccupied with a thousand other concerns such as secularism, technology, the arms race, the threat of nuclear war, hunger, injustice and exploitation. Yet neither the author of this book, who often worked twelve hours a day throughout a period of several years, nor, certainly myself would have devoted our time to such undertakings if we had thought that the whole enterprise was simply an antiquarian's task of merely speculative interest and intended only for an elite readership.
I ask myself the well-known question in christian monasticism: Quid hoc ad aeternitatem? Of what service is it for eternity? And I ask, in the opposite sense: Of what service is it for secularity? That is to say, of what service is it for human life, that life that we observe around us and more especially that we ourselves live day to day?
I do not wish to reply in a polemical spirit that it is of no service because one has passed out of the realm of any sort of service or sevitude, because one is sovereign and free and not slavish, because the question is a captious one and could cause us to fall into despair and let ourselves be dominated and exploited by those who, not asking themselves this type of question, manipulate individuals and the masses in order to serve their own ends. I wish to reply in a different way, in the non-violent and conciliatory spirit of the Jainas.
For this we need to adopt a world-view that may give us a broader
ive and a calm and considered reply. In regard to this we should stress the importance of the Jaina doctrine in the realm of comparative studies. If the West has built its worl-vision mainly on the concept of the Aristotelian substance modified to a greater or lesser extent, so that it considers things as substances and God as the Supreme Substance, and if on the other hand much of the Buddhist East has built up a world-vision based on the non-substantiality of things which in turn leads to the negation of any concept of a primal substance, the Jaina intuition offers us another "basic choice, an entirely different experience of reality. Of this, moreover, the consequences are not only theoretical! We might, in one great leap, arrive at the thought that Jaina teaching offers an alternative to the