What is Jainism

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 82

ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES
of which conceals a scientific truth. There was a key to the understanding of these truths which was, in the B. C. days of the ages gone by, possessed by every teacher of the mystic script ; but it was subsequently lost, and it is this “ Key of Knowledge " the loss of which is commented upon in such remarkably severe terms in one of the gospels :
“Woe unto you, lawyers ! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.”—Luke xi. 52.
And what has been said of the Holy Bible in this respect also holds good in regard to the other scriptures that have been referred to above.*
The result of ignorance has been far-reaching. It has set us quarrelling with our fellow-men, instead of reconciling us to one another. What happens when a person is born in the world is this that his parents and guardians hand him a set of the sacred pictograms, which, of course, they do not themselves understand and are naturally also unable to explain to him. He is required, under one form of religious sanction or another, to put faith into the set thus handed to him, and accepts a good deal of the parental instruction for truth. As he grows up in life he comes in contact with other men who possess similar sets; but these are different from his. Then there is a comparison of the merits of the different sets, for men will begin to talk on any subject when brought together. Soon it is found that the sets do not agree, and then every one begins to praise the superiority of his own possessions over those of the others. This is how misunderstandings are generated in the sphere of religion ; and what have they not led men to in the past ?
From another point of view, the child accepts, with implicit trust, the parents' word, whom he certainly has good reason to look upon as his best friends and benefactors, and puts faith into it as
* Cf. “The desire for knowledge is Divine commandment for every Muslim ; and to instruct in knowledge those who are unworthy of it is like putting pearls, jewels and gold on the necks of swine ... The calamity of knowledge is forgetfulness; and to lose knowledge is this, to speak of it to the unworthy."— Traditions (Muslim), see Extracts from the Holy Quran by Abdullah Allahdin, pp. 102-103.