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Mahâvîra is said to have taught that place, time and occasion should be taken into consideration and his successors adapted their precepts to the age in which they lived. Such monks as I have met maintained that extreme forms of tapas were good for the nerves of ancient saints but not for the weaker natures of to-day. But in avoiding rigorous severity, they have not fallen into sloth or luxury.
The former do not emphasize the novelty of his revelation and the latter treat Jainism as a well-known form of error without indicating that it was either new or attributable to one individual. Mahâvîra, or the great hero, is the common designation of the twenty-fourth Jina but his personal name was Vardhamâna.
The Vedânta and Sânkhya are really, if less obviously, similar clearings. They raise no objection to popular divinities but such divinities do not come within the scope of religious philosophy as they understand it. We have hitherto been occupied with obscure and shadowy personalities. The authors of the Upanishads are nameless and even MahâvÎra is unknown outside India.
At that time the influence of the Brahmans had hardly permeated Bihar, though predominant to the west of it, and speculation there followed lines different from those laid down in the Upanishads, but of some antiquity, for we know that there were Buddhas before Gotama and that Mahâvîra, the founder of Jainism, reformed the doctrine of an older teacher called Parśva.
But more accurately it may be called an early specialized form of the general movement which culminated in Buddhism. Its founder, Mahâvîra, was an earlier contemporary of the Buddha and not a pupil or imitator . Even had its independent appearance been later, we might still say that it represents an earlier stage of thought. Its kinship to the theories mentioned in the last chapter is clear.
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.
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