Atmanandji Jainacharya Janmashatabdi Smarakgranth

Author(s): Mohanlal Dalichand Desai
Publisher: Atmanand Janma Shatabdi Smarak Trust

Page 109

Hiralal Jain
the Bible, in the life of Christ and his Apostles. The Sufi saints of Muhammadanism were great mystics. All these have belonged to different times and lived in different lands. They arose from very different strata of society and breathed in divergent atmospheres of religion and culture. They have also differed considerably in their intellectual out-fit and emotional tendencies, so far as we can see from the accounts available to us. And yet theirs is a remarkable unity in their mystic experiences, so much so that they may be said to form a common society superseding all the barriers of land and time and religion. It is this common vein in their wonderful experiences which compells our attention to them.
Amongst the Jainas, their Tirthamkaras have been their greatest mystics, and a somewhat detailed account of the first of them Rishabhadeva is preserved even in the Bhagavata Purana of the Brahmins, mentioned above. The writings of Kundakundacharya, a very ancient philosopher, are full of mysticism consisting of the realisation of the self as the Supreme God or Paramatman. Joindu, also known as Yogachandra and Yogendra, has expounded, in his Paramatma-prakasha, how the Bahiratman or the extrovert may become Antaratman or introvert and eventually Paramatman. My purpose here is to give a brief account of the mysticism preached by another similar Jaina saint Ramasimha whose work Pahuda-doha has recently been discovered. The book is written in Dohas or couplets, in Apabhramsa language, of which there are 222. On good grounds the work is assignable to the later part of the 10th or the earlier part of the 11th century A. D. In a simple but forceful style, the saint preaches that real and lasting happiness can not be derived from the external world-the world of the senses which only increase the thirst and the hankering after every act of satisfaction. The real bliss is experienced only when the attention is altogether withdrawn from the sensual objects into the self in such a way that the seer and the seen, the aspirant and the aspired-after, become unified, and complete
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Edited with complete Hindi translation introductions, glossary and notes by the writer and published in the Karanja Jaina Series.
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[Shree Atmaramji