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And yet they are so narrow in their conception of their faith, that they declined, the other day, to receive into their fold the English bride of one of their number. Thus they decided that there is no door of entrance into their religion for any one who is not a born Parsee. It is in this city, also, that we find a large representation of another ancient cult Jainism.
Jainism, a sect of Hinduism, was founded in the 6th century B.C. by Mahavira, a contemporary of Buddha. Mahavira means "great hero"; may he look down the centuries on his heroic son Gandhi! An Indo-Aryan language based largely on Sanskrit roots, Hindi is the chief vernacular of northern India. Its subdialect, Urdu, is spoken by Moslems.
Though the books of the Jain canon contain ancient matter, yet they seem, as compositions, considerably later than the older parts of the Buddhist Tripitaka. They do not claim to record recent events and teaching but are attempts at synthesis which assume that Jainism is well known and respected.
A circumstance which shows very clearly how far Buddhism was from bearing the character of a revolt, is the occurrence at the same time and in the same district of India of another movement of a very similar nature. Jainism is an Indian religion so like Buddhism as to have been considered by many to be a sect of the latter.
It does not indeed deny responsibility and free will, but its advocacy of extreme asceticism and death by starvation has a touch of the same extravagance and its list of elements in which physical substances and ideas are mixed together is curiously crude. Jainism is atheistic, and this atheism is as a rule neither apologetic nor polemical but is accepted as a natural religious attitude.
But Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Pythagoreanism all had their rise about this time; the age of religions began then; it was not a thing of chance, but marked a definite change in the spiritual climate of the world. The Bundahish, the Parsee account of it, says that he lived 258 years before Alexander; almost all scholars reject the figure once more, "it is their nature to."
Both lines of thought look for salvation in the liberation of the soul to be attained by the suppression of the passions and the acquisition of true knowledge. Jainism belongs to the second of these classes.
About the same time Buddha and the founder of Jainism in India, Laotse and Confucius in China, and as we have seen, probably also Zoroaster in Persia, all broke away from the Official Mysteries, more or less, to found Theosophical Movements of their own; which would indicate that, at least from the Tyrrhenian to the Yellow Sea, the Mysteries had, in that sixth century, ceased to be the efficient instrument of the White Lodge.
The change now going on in our Southern States might well go on in Southern India, and I welcome the sight of the factory chimneys of Ahmedabad. Ahmedabad is not yet converted to Christianity. It is a celebrated stronghold of Jainism, and here is another most splendid temple.
This is a misnomer, for the school was in reality the product of a period rather than a sect, though Jainism probably never enjoyed anywhere, or at any time, such political ascendancy as in Gujerat under its Rashtrakuta and Solanki rulers from the ninth to the thirteenth century, and seldom has there been such an outburst of architectural activity as amongst the Jains of that period.
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