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JAINISM
supreme objects of Jaina contemplation, the Tirthankaras, have passed beyond the godly governors of the natural order. Jainism, that is to say, is not atheistic; it is transtheistic. Its Tirthankaras who represent the proper goal of all human beings, the goal in fact of all living entities in this living universe of reincarnating monads-are “cut off" (kevala) from the provinces of creation, preservation, and destruction, which are the concerns and spheresof-operation of the gods. The Makers of the River-Crossing are beyond cosmic event as well as the problems of biography; they are transcendent, cleaned of temporality, omniscient, actionless, and absolutely at peace. The contemplation of their state as represented in their curiously anesting images, coupled with the graded.progressively rigorous exercises of Jaina ascetic discipline, brings the individual though the course of many lifetimes gradually past the needs and anxieties of human prayer, past even the deities who respond to prayer, and beyond the blissful heavens in which those gods and their worshipers abide, into the remote, transcendent, "cut-off" zone of pure, uninflected existence to which the Crossing-Makers, the Tirthankaras, have cleaved the way.
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The foundation of Jainism has been attributed by Occidental historians to Vardhamana Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha, who died c. 526 B.C. The Jainas themselves, however, regard Mahāvīra not as the first but as the last of their long series of Tirthankaras. The traditional number of these is twenty-four, and their line is supposed to have descended through the centuries from prehistoric times. The carlier of them undoubtedly are mythological, and mythology has been poured abundantly into the biographies of the rest, nevertheless it is becoming increasingly evident that there must be some truth in the Jaina tradition of the great antiquity of their religion. At least with respect to Pārsva, the Tirthankara just preceding Mahāvīra, we
2 Cf. supra, p. 60, Editor's note, and Appendix B.
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |