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This sect is now important more by influence than by numbers in India, many of the richest merchants of the great Indian cities being among its adherents, though by the last census of British India there appears to be but a little over nine millions of Jains and Buddhists together, out of the one hundred and ninety millions of Hindus in British India.

This was the rock on which they split with Hinduism. This was the social revolution that, in spite of the religious and philosophical elasticity of Hinduism, made Buddhists and Jains unpardonable heretics in the eyes of the Brahmans, and produced a conflict which was to last for centuries.

He appears to have objected to confraternities , to have enjoined a solitary life, absolute nudity and extreme forms of self-mortification, such as eating filth. The Jains accused his followers of immorality and perhaps they were ancient prototypes of the lower class of religious mendicants who have brought discredit on Hinduism.

This sounds ambitious, but the special method of reasoning favoured by the Jains is the modest Syâdvâda or doctrine of may-be, which holds that you can affirm the existence of a thing from one point of view, deny it from another, and affirm both existence and non-existence with reference to it at different times.

If neither the Jains nor the Buddhists allowed themselves to be embarrassed by such denials of free will, the inference is that in some matters at least the Hindus had strong common sense and declined to accept any view which takes away from man the responsibility and lordship of his own soul. The Origin of Evil

By atheism, of course, a denial of the existence of Devas is not meant; the Jains surpass, if possible, the exuberant fancy of the Brahmans and Buddhists in designing imaginary worlds and peopling them with angelic or diabolical inhabitants, but, as in Buddhism, these beings are like mankind subject to transmigration and decay and are not the masters, still less the creators, of the universe.

In the sixth chapter I attempt to give a picture of religious life, both Brahmanic and non-Brahmanic, as it existed in India about the time when the Buddha was born. Of the non-Brahmanic sects which then flourished most have disappeared, but one, namely the Jains, has survived and left a considerable record in literature and art. I have therefore devoted a chapter to it here.

The courtyard is inclosed by a colonnade of beautifully carved columns, upon which open fifty shrines with pagoda domes about twelve feet high, and in each of them are figures of Tirthankars, or saints of the calendar of the Jains. The temple is dedicated to Dharmamath, a sort of Jain John the Baptist, whose image, crowned with diamonds and other jewels, sits behind a beautiful gilded screen.

The Parsees and Jains are more eager for learning than the Hindus, and are taking an active part in educational affairs. The Mohammedans are also realizing the importance of modern schools, and there is now quite an energetic movement among that sect. There is a school connected with almost every Jain temple. We visited one at Delhi. There were no benches or desks.

The tenets of the Jains are too complicated for description here, but it may be said that much doubt exists as to whether it is an old religion of which Brahmanism and Buddhism are varieties, or whether it is itself a variety of Buddhism. Indeed, it does not seem well settled whether the pure Jain doctrine was atheistical or theistical.