AN Englishman who went to see a Hindu saint was deterred from entering the cave where the holy man lived by the spectacle of numerous rats. The hermit, observing his hesitation, inquired what was the matter? “Don’t you see them?” answered his visitor. “Yes,” was the brief reply. “Why don’t you kill them?” asked the Englishman. “Why should I kill them?” said the native of the land. Finding the whole onus of the discussion thrown on his shoulders, the English traveller felt that it would be difficult with his limited knowledge of the language to express a European’s ideas about rats. He thought to sum up the case in one sentence: “We people kill them.” To which the saint answered: “We people don’t kill them.”
In another country, but still among a race which has inherited the habit of looking at questions between man and animals not exclusively from the man’s point of view, a learned professor proposed to an old gardener at Yezd that they should dig up an ant-hill to ascertain if the local prejudice were true which insisted that inside each ant-hill there lodged two scorpions. The old Persian declined to be a party to any such proceeding. “As long as the scorpions stay inside,” he said with decision, “we have no right to molest them and to do so would bring ill-luck.”
These anecdotes show, amusingly and convincingly, the wall of demarcation between Eastern and Western thought by which the son of the West is apt to find his passage barred. They serve my purpose in quoting them the better because they are not connected with the religious sect whose precepts I am going to sketch. They illustrate what I believe to be true, namely, that this sect and Buddhism itself would not have made their way in so wonderful a manner, seemingly almost without effort, had they not found the ground prepared by a racial tendency to fly to the doctrine of Ahimsa, or “non-killing,” which forms part of their systems.
No religion prevails unless it appeals to some chord, if not of the human heart everywhere, at least of the particular human hearts to which it is directed. In the West a religion based on Vegetarianism would not have a chance. Not that there exists no trace of the life-preserving instinct among Western peoples—far from that. All nice children have it and all saints of the type of him of Assisi. Other people have it who are neither children, nor saints, nor yet lunatics (“though by your smiling you seem to say so”). I know an old hero of the Siege of Delhi who to this day would stoop to lift a worm from his path. But the sentiment, which in the West is rather a secret thing, forming a sort of freemasonry among those who feel it, asserts its sway in the East in the broad light of day. No one there would mind giving the fullest publicity to his opinion that the scorpion has as good a right to live undisturbed in his domestic ant-hill as you have in your suburban villa.
Long before the Jainas made Ahimsa a gateway to perfection, innumerable Asiatics practised and even preached the very same rule. It was the bond of union between all the religious teachers and ascetics who constituted a well-defined feature in Indian life from remote if not from the earliest antiquity. The founders of Jainism and of Buddhism, too, were Gurus like the rest, only they possessed an intensified magnetic influence and, at least in Buddha’s case, an unique genius. Every Eastern religion has been taught by a Guru, not excepting the most divine of them all.[[4]]
[4]. “It is stated of the Divine Founder of the Christian religion that without a parable spoke He not to the people. Christ, in fact, acted and taught as an Oriental Guru, a character which none of the European writers of Christ’s life has invested Him with” (Rev. J. Long: v. “Oriental Proverbs” in the Report of the Proceedings of the Second Congress of Orientalists).
In the occurrence of a new religious evolution much depends on the individual, but much also on the fulness of time. When Buddhism and Jainism arose, the psychological moment was come for a change or modification in the current faith. To some degree, both were a revolt against Sacerdotalism. Men were told that they could work out their salvation without priestly aid or intervention. The new teachers, though each springing from the class of the feudal nobility, won to their side the surging wave of the only kind of democratic yearning which, till now, Asia has known—the yearning for religious equality. Professor Hermann Jacobi (the foremost authority on Jainism, to whom all who study the subject owe an unbounded debt) suggests that there was a certain friction between the highly meritorious of the noble and the priestly castes because the priests were inclined to look down on the layman saint. To this category belonged Sakya Muni, who was the younger son of a prince, or, as we should say, a feudal lord, and who renounced rank and riches to become a recluse. The same family history is told of Mahavira, whom the Jainas claim to be their founder. For a long time Europeans believed the two religions to have but one source, and Jainism was dismissed as a Buddhist sect. The Jainas, however, always strongly held that they had a founder of their own, namely, Mahavira, and they even declared that Buddha was not his master but his disciple. After much research, Professor Jacobi decided the case in their favour by assigning to them a separate origin. Both Sakya Muni and Mahavira are generally believed to have flourished in the sixth century B.C.
The confusion of the Jainas with the Buddhists and even with the Brahmans has made it difficult to reckon their present numbers: in the census of 1901 they are estimated at 1,334,138, chiefly living in the Bombay Presidency, but this does not tell us their real number. Jainas are to be found almost everywhere in Upper India, in the West and South and along the Ganges. They inhabit the towns more than the country. In treating ancient Indian religions the living document is always round the corner, ready to be called into the witness-box, and the Jainas of to-day can give a good account of themselves. Every one has a good word for them; a friend of mine, than whom few know India better, describes them thus: “A tall, fair, handsome, good and humble lot they are and terribly bullied they are by their more bellicose fellow-countrymen, who all look on Jainas as made for them to pilfer, but the Jainas never turn on their persecutors.” In spite of their meekness, they are good men of business, which is proved by their remarkable success in commerce. Perhaps it is not such bad policy to be peaceful, and helpful, and honest as a cynical century supposes.
The Jainas say of Mahavira that he was one of a long line of holy ascetics twenty-four of whom are venerated in their temples under the name of Tirthakaras or Jinas, “Conquerors” in the sense of having conquered the flesh. Needless to point out that the founders of great religious systems invariably accept this principle of evolution: they complete what others began, and in due time a new manifestation will arrive either in the form of a more perfect revelation of themselves or in that of a fore-destined successor. The Buddhists now await Matreya, or “the Buddha of kindness.” The Jainas have not added to their twenty-four glorified beings, but there is nothing to prevent them from doing so. To these specimens of perfected humanity they have raised some of the most glorious temples ever lifted by the hand of man towards heaven. Tier on tier mount the exquisitely beautiful towers of the Jaina cathedrals in the most lonely part of the Muklagerri hills. They seem like the Parsifal music turned into stone: an allegory of the ascent of the soul from corruption to incorruption, from change to permanency. The desire to worship something finds a vent in the reverence paid to the Tirthakaras, but the Jaina religion admits neither relics nor the iteration of prayers. The building of splendid shrines and of refuges for man and beast are the particular means of grace open to the Jaina who cannot comply in all respects with the exacting demands of his scriptures, which, were they literally fulfilled, would leave no one on the world but ascetics. The wealthy Jaina is only too glad to avail himself of the chance of acquiring some merit, however far it must fall short of the highest. Besides this, in moments of religious fervour temple-building becomes a frenzy: whole races are swept along by the blind impulse to incarnate their spiritual cravings in spires or pagodas or minarets pointing to the sky—the eternal symbol. The greatest of Jaina temples mark the epoch of some such wave of spiritual emotion.
The Jaina scriptures, which were first collected from aural report and written down by a learned man in the sixth century A.D., are really a Rule of Discipline for monks, and not a guide for the mass of mankind. If we could imagine the only Christian Scripture being the immortal book of Thomas à Kempis, we should form the idea of a very similar state of things. It is surprising not how little but how much of this rigid rule is followed by every Jaina to this day, be he monk or layman. The vegetarian principle involved in Ahimsa is observed rigorously by all—clearly with no bad effect on health after a trial of about twenty-four centuries, for the Jainas’ physique is excellent, and they are less subject to disease than the other communities. They strain and boil water before drinking, and whatever may be said of the motive, the practice must be highly commended. They are also often to be seen wearing a mouth-cloth to prevent them from swallowing flies, and they carry little brooms with which they sweep insects out of their path. The hospitals for sick animals begin to be better managed than formerly, when they incurred much censure as mere conglomerations of hopeless suffering to relieve which practical means were not taken. A folly adopted by the more fanatical Jainas at the time of their origin was that of going “sky-clad,” which makes it probable that they were the gymnosophists known to the Greeks. They saw well later to limit this practice to certain times and occasions or to abandon it for the far more pleasant one of wearing white garments. Buddha warned his followers against the “sky-clad” aberration. He disagreed with the Jainas on a more vital point in the view he took of penance and self-inflicted torture. It shows the high intellectuality of the man that towards the end of his life he pronounced penance, though he had gone through much of it himself, to be vanity of vanities. The Jainas took the opposite view: “Subdue the body just as fire consumes old wood.” They hold that merit is bound up with a certain definite and tangible thing: the Buddhist, more philosophically, makes it consist in intention. This is the chief doctrinal difference between Jaina and Buddhist, and though each is bound to charity and the Jaina is particularly enjoined by his scriptures not to turn other people’s religion into ridicule, it has to be confessed that in their frequent disputes they spare no pains and neglect no arts of Socratic reasoning to reduce each other’s theories to an absurdity. Irony is a weapon always used in Indian religious discussion.