[ p. 129 ]
II. JAINISM
IT was inevitable that heresies should arise, once asceticism began to spread in old India. It may be laid down as an axiom that a man who does not live the life of the mob will not think its thoughts either. He cannot but become unorthodox in spirit as well as conduct, looking out on life from an angle of his own, and drawing his own conclusions. Therefore it was but natural for the advent of asceticism in India to be accompanied by the advent of heterodoxy. In the sixth century B. C., India literally swarmed with heresies. Sects arose in a night and perished in a night; prophets were hailed and forgotten between the phases of a moon. Indeed, only two of all the movements initiated in that century endured long enough even for their names to be remembered. But those two endured well — passing well. . . .
The less important of those two was the sect now known as Jainism. Its founder was a young prince named Mahavira, a man who lived until the age of thirty the riotous life of an Indian rajah, and then of a [ p. 130 ] sudden turned ascetic. “I shall for twelve years neglect my body/’ he vowed; and, casting off his fine clothes, plucking out his hair in five handfuls, he went off into the jungles. And after those twelve years of self-denial had passed, he reached Nirvana. From then on he was called the Jina, the “Conqueror,” for of all men he seemed the most thoroughly to have conquered every last form of human desire. And abandoning his solitude thenceforth, he began to go up and down the Ganges Valley to tell his fellow-men just how he had attained salvation.
Now Mahavira was certain that he had become the Jina, the “Conqueror,” without the help either of the gods or the brahmins. He did not believe in the gods, and he scoffed at the very idea of prayer. “Man! Thou art thine own friend!” he cried. “Why shouldst thou crave a friend beyond thyself?” He derided the Vedas and decried the entire caste system. All he believed in was the willful annihilation of the self, the rigorous and unsparing destruction of every desire save the desire for no-desire. He demanded of his disciples that they do injury to no living thing, that they remain ever poor and ever meek. “Dish-water, barley-pap, cold sour gruel, water in which barley has been washed: such loathsome food the mendicants should never despise.” He forbade his followers to hate, and he also forbade them to love, for Mahavira considered the one as earthbinding as the other. And especially did he warn them against showing any favor to women. It is a pity we know so little that is authentic concerning the life of Mahavira, or we might be able to discover just what it was that made him so bitter a misogynist. Lust must [ p. 131 ] naturally have been a frightful thorn in his spoiled princely flesh, and perhaps that was why he so unjustly branded woman as the cause of all sinful acts. He commanded the true follower not to “speak of women, nor look at them, nor converse with them, nor claim them as his own, nor do their work.”
But above all he forbade his monks to kill. “This,” said Mahavira, “is the quintessence of wisdom: not to kill anything!” And of all the prohibitions, this was the one most scrupulously observed. Solicitude against destroying life — and life was thought to be not merely in man but also in animals, plants, even grains of dust — drove the followers of Mahavira to the most grotesque of excesses. Some of them sat immobile for years, refusing to stir a limb or even breathe deeply, lest thereby they destroy aught of those small insects with which the air of India swarms. They refused to wash their teeth, or cleanse their clothes, or scratch their bodies when the vermin nipped them. To this day they maintain hospitals for animals, caring even for sick snakes and rats and even lice! . . . Only one form of destruction was permitted: self-destruction. As death approached, the holy Jain might make his one last effort to sunder the chain of transmigration by bravely crushing all desire for sustenance and starving himself to death! Then at last he was free. …
MAHAVIRA, the founder of Jainism, was born in 599 B. C. and died in 529. According to tradition he preached untiringly during all the last thirty years of his life, and when he died he left many disciples to carry [ p. 132 ] on his work. But those disciples were smaller men than die Jina, and at their hands his gospel came in for profound and sorry perversion. In the first place the personality of the Jina was exalted until he was made out to be almost a god. Legends sprang up around his name, fantastic stories recounting the miracles attendant on his birth and death. And before many generations had passed he actually was declared to be a veritable god! That gentle, quiet anchorite who had given more than half his life to preaching the worthlessness of gods and the futility of prayers was himself deified and prayed to. By the year 400 the Jains were already setting up idols of Mahavira, and building beautiful temples in which they burnt regular offerings of flowers and incense. Then, not satisfied with one god, the Jains created twenty-four other Jinas to adore. They said that Mahavira was only the last and greatest of a long line of divine “Conquerors,” and they surrounded his image with images of all the twenty- four others. Even then they were not satisfied, for later they added many female divinities to the pantheon. Century after century the people took up new gods and spirits to worship and cling to, until finally Jainism became almost as crudely polytheistic as the old Vedic religion it had once set out to reform. The brave atheistic spirit in which Jainism had been conceived seeped out of it entirely, and the highest heresy preached by Mahavira was the one most flagrantly betrayed.
Of course, that was all but inevitable. Once Jainism began to spread among the plain people, its first principles simply had no chance of surviving. Mahavira had preached a gospel utterly beyond the comprehension [ p. 133 ] of ordinary men. He himself had Been one of those mighty souls for whom the consciousness merely of living the right life was enough. He had not needed gods to ding to. Right Faith, Right Knowledge, and Right Living — called by him the “Three Jewels” — had by themselves been enough to win him salvation. . . . But those who came after him were weaker men. In their blind eyes the Three Jewels seemed worthless without a setting in a tinsel plate of theology. Those followers were not courageous enough to stake all on their own strength of will. They simply had to have gods to aid them. . . .
But that was not the only issue in Mahavira’s gospel which his followers surrendered. Mahavira had revolted against the whole caste system, declaring that all men, low-caste as well as high, were equals once they entered the Sangha, the “Congregation.” But as soon as he died, that heresy died too, and before long even the very gods were divided into distinct social classes. Only the commandment against killing was not openly betrayed; but as we have already seen its observance was carried to the absurdest extremes. Save for that. Jainism became hardly distinguishable from orthodox Hinduism. The religion took unto itself gods, idoK temples, priests, sacrifices — every one of the old means of salvation which Mahavira had most scornfully rejected. … But what else was to be expected? After all the common folk in India — like the common folk everywhere else in the world — were (and are) still too weak to look to their own selves for salvation. They needed reeds to cling to, gods to believe in. For they were (and are) afraid . . . afraid. . . .