Vijaydharmasuri

Author(s): A J Sunavala
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Page 41

COMMENCEMENT OF TRIUMPHAL TOUR 35 poverty and chastity and truthfulness, possessing nothing and dependent for his very subsistence on the alms of the charitable, the homeless ascetic passed from one place to another, wandering through the villages, towns, and cities of Kathiawar, Gujarat, and Marwar, everywhere preaching and propagating his religion, everywhere conferring invaluable benefits upon mankind. We see him moving from place to place, living the life of a teacher, a life beautiful in its purity, simplicity and sincerity, radiant with love, with compassion, and with all the tenderest emotions of the human heart. We see him raising, by his power of speech and persuasion, the ignorant masses from their secular sluggishness, stimulating them to activity, and awakening in them an interest in all that is good and true and noble. We see him, by his eloquence and instruction, curing the illiterate and uneducated people of their gross superstitions, their petty jealousies, their social prejudices, and thus making them purer and happier, more peaceful and more contented. We see him, by his learning and exhortation and influence, presenting and spreading the truer and deeper views of his faith, composing religious disputes and differences, restoring and reestablishing the annual pilgrimages which had long been discontinued and left in negleet, thus causing the considerable wealth of the community to be spent in charitable institutions of public utility, and in this way infusing a new life into the decaying, but not dying, body of Jainism.