3. The Jain tenets. The Tirthakars.
Like the Buddhists, the Jains recognise no creator of the world, and suppose it to have existed from eternity. Similarly, they had originally no real god, but the Jīna or victor, like the Buddha or Enlightened One, was held to have been an ordinary mortal man, who by his own power had attained to omniscience and freedom, and out of pity for suffering mankind preached and declared the way of salvation which he had found.[5] This doctrine, however, was too abstruse for the people, and in both cases the prophet himself gradually came to be deified. Further, in order perhaps to furnish objects of worship less distinctively human and to whom a larger share of the attributes of deity could be imputed, in both religions a succession of mythical predecessors of the prophet was gradually brought into existence. The Buddhists recognise twenty-five Buddhas or divine prophets, who appeared at long epochs of time and taught the same system one after another; and the Jains have twenty-four Tirthakārs or Tirthānkars, who similarly taught their religion. Of these only Vardhamāna, its real founder, who was the twenty-fourth, and possibly Pārsva or Pārasnāth, the twenty-third and the founder’s preceptor, are or may be historical. The other twenty-two Tirthakārs are purely mythical. The first, Rishaba, was born more than 100 billion years ago, as the son of a king of Ajodhya; he lived more than 8 million years, and was 500 bow-lengths in height. He therefore is as superhuman as any god, and his date takes us back almost to eternity. The others succeeded each other at shorter intervals of time, and show a progressive decline in stature and length of life. The images of the Tirthakārs are worshipped in the Jain temples like those of the Buddhas in Buddhist temples. As with Buddhism also, the main feature of Jain belief is the transmigration of souls, and each successive incarnation depends on the sum of good and bad actions or karman in the previous life. They hold also the primitive animistic doctrine that souls exist not only in animals and plants but in stones, lumps of earth, drops of water, fire and wind, and the human soul may pass even into these if its sins condemn it to such a fate.[6]