Unless a man had been born a Brāhman,[1] he must remain in all the hurry, sorrow and discontent of the world, until his life’s end; but to a Brāhman the way of escape was always open; he must pass through the four Āśrama (or stages), and having been successively a student, a householder, and a hermit, spend the remaining years of his life as a wandering mendicant.
There must have been constant revolts against the exclusiveness that so selfishly barred the door to other castes, and echoes more or less clear of such revolts have come down to us, but only two were really permanent—the revolt of the Buddhists and the revolt of the Jaina. The Buddhists are scarcely found any longer in India proper, but the Jaina exist as an influential and wealthy community of laymen who support a large body of ascetics, the only example of the early mediaeval monastic orders of India which has survived to our day.
Both Buddhist and Jaina orders arose about the same time, the sixth century B.C., a period when the constant wars between various little kingdoms must have made the lot of the common people hideous with suffering and oppression; and a man might well have longed to escape from all fear of rebirth into such a sorrowful world, and have hoped, by renouncing everything that could be taken from him, and by voluntarily stripping himself of all possessions and all emotions, to evade the avaricious fingers of king or fortune.[2]
About this time, too, a wave of religious feeling was making itself felt in various parts of the world, and India has always been peculiarly susceptible to psychic emotions.
- ↑ Some European scholars doubt this, but all the Jaina the writer has met believe it most strongly; and the aim of this book throughout is to present the Jaina point of view and to reflect current Jaina opinions.
- ↑ 'At one time, his manifold savings are a large treasure. Then at another time, his heirs divide it, or those are without a living steal it, or the king takes it away, or it is ruined in some way or other, or it is consumed by the conflagration of the house.' Āċārāṅga Sūtra, S.B.E., xxii, p. 20.
B 2
