Unknown Pilgrims

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

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The Unknown Pilgrims
God who none the less permits the suffering of innocents and indiscriminate evil: if he allows such a situation, then either he is not a good Father or else he is not All-powerful. A solution can only be found by demonstrating that the problem is ill posed: a "Father" such as this does not exist, grace is not magic and liberty is something other than what one supposes. To obtain a clearer idea, one must lay bare the true factors in the problem. These in the case of the present world situation are the anthropological and cosmological premises which form an integral part of the western world's world-view and which, through science and technology, have imposed themselves on a large part of this whole planet. The metaphysical and moral premises of modernity are "in crisis", but the anthropological and cosmological views that were formed during a long period of gestation in the west are still the accepted myths.
Now in the Jaina community these views are quite different. Underlying them is an anthropology that explains the rationale and coherence of their system. I recognize that this same anthropology is to be found also in other traditions, but I like to think that among the Jainas it is preserved with a certain purity, even, one might say, with a certain naivety; that makes it easier to contrast the difference and indicate its consequences.
Jaina anthropology is inseparable from the cosmology which sustains it. Man is not viewed as an isolated individual or as the king of creation entrusted with a mission to dominate it, and still less to save it. Nor, on the other hand, is Man a more or less undifferentiated part of the whole. What gives the Jaina world-view a validity for today is precisely its sui generis individualism, which is foreign to other Indic concepts of reality. Jaina Man is an individual, the reality of each Man is the personal jiva or åtman, the Self or soul. There are no two identical souls. The Jaina world is a world of plurality. Each living being is unique and there is an abhorrence of inhuman collectivism. At the risk of repeating a dangerous slogan, one might say that Jainism is a humanism. Man constitutes the supreme and definitive reality -but not in this present life. Human beings should disencumber themselves of the material wrappings of all sorts, gross and subtle, by which they are gripped. The individual exists, however, within the total cosmological framework of Jainism, the complexity of which is like that of the astronomy of contemporary science. We