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Updated: June 23, 2025
'Fall to, Holy Ones! he cried from fifty yards. King of my fields, this to the small son 'let us show these holy men that we Jats of Jullundur can pay a service ... I had heard the Jains would eat nothing that they had not cooked, but truly' he looked away politely over the broad river 'where there is no eye there is no caste.
In India, under the common generic name of Hinduism, there are also many sects: worshippers of Vishnu, worshippers of Siva, worshippers of Krishna. There are Sikhs, and Jains, and devil worshippers; among the Dravidian and other pre-Aryan tribes there are victims of every conceivable superstition. Now, a missionary must know something of these faiths if he would fight with "weapons of precision."
The sacred hill of Sunaghur, lying a few miles to the south of Gwalior, is one of the Meccas of the Jains, and is covered with temples in many styles, which display the fertility of their architectural invention: there are over eighty of these structures in all.
According to a tradition which probably contains elements of truth the first collection of sacred works was made about 200 years after Mahâvîra's death by a council which sat at Pataliputra. Just about the same time came the famine already mentioned and many Jains migrated to the south.
"The Parsees, of whom a few families own half the place, are prominent in business, as in Bombay; and they supply the most skilful mechanics, the liveliest clerks, and the quickest boys in the schools. They have two fire-temples here. The Hindus, especially the Buniahs and the Jains, are as prominent as in Bombay.
He is seated upon an exquisite platform of alabaster, with legs crossed and arms folded, silent and immovable, engaged in the contemplation of the good and beautiful, and his lips are wreathed in a smile that comprehends all human beings and will last throughout eternity. Around this temple, as usual with the Jains, is a cloister a wide colonnade supported by a double row of pillars.
One is a tank choked with weeds and lotus-flowers, which has a small island in the centre containing a temple, with two stones in the interior, on one of which is an inscription and the impression of the two feet of Gautama the most common object of worship of the Jains in this district.
"The most prominent Indian sects are the Saïvas, or worshippers of Siva; the Vaïshnavas, who bow down to Vishnu under his several incarnations, like Krishna, whom you could not greatly respect; and the Jaïns, allied to the Buddhists, found mostly in the northern sections of India. They occupy important positions, and possess wealth and influence.
Though the Jains thus occupy an honourable, and even distinguished place in the history of letters it must be confessed that it is hard to praise their older religious books. This literature is of considerable scientific interest for it contains many data about ancient India as yet unsifted but it is tedious in style and rarely elevated in sentiment.
In Kalinga, Andhra and the kingdom of the Colas the pilgrim reports that Jains were very numerous but counts Buddhist monasteries only by tens and twenties. In Dravida there were also 10,000 monks of the Sthavira school but in Malakuta among many ruined monasteries only a few were still inhabited and here again Jains were numerous.
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