Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
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

Page 198

PĀRSVA
have grounds for believing that he actually lived and taught, and was a Jaina.
Pārsvanātha, “the Lord Pārsva," is supposed to have attained liberation about two hundred and forty-six years before Vardhamāna Mahāvīra, the historic "founder" of the Jaina religion. If 526 B.c. be taken as the year of the Lord Mahāvīra's gaining of nirvāņa, 772 B.C. may then he said to be that of Pārsvanātha's. According to the legend, he dwelt in the world exactly one hundred years, having left home at the age of thirty to become an ascetic; from which it may be concluded that he was born about 872 B.C. and left his palace around 842. Pārsvanātha is reckoned as the twenty-third in the legendary series of the Tīrthankaras, having entered the world eighty-four thousand years after the nirvāna of Bhagavan Aristanemi, the twenty-second of this long spiritual line. His life, or rather lives, following as they do the pattern typical for the orthodox biographies of Jaina saints, will serve as our introduction to the trials and victories of the last and supreme of the four aims of Indian lise, that of spiritual release (mokşa). The saint's biography is offered as a model for all those who would put off the heavy load of earthly birth.
He had been dwelling and ruling as an Indra in the thirteenth
3 The term nirvana belongs by no means exclusively to Buddhist tradition. The metaphor is derived from the image of the flame. Nir-va means "to blow out; to ceasc to draw breath." Nirvana is "blown out": the fire of desire, for want of fuel, is quenched and pacified.
* One hundred lunar years is regarded as the ideal length of life. The flawless saint and man of virtuc is endowed with pericct hcalth by reason of his pure, ascetic conduct; and by reason of his meritorious deeds in former lives he is blessed with a bright karma. The latter results in a wellbalanced constitution of unsurpassed strength. Though one hundred years may be an overstatement, Pārsva probably reached, as did the Buddha and many other famous Indian ascetics, a remarkably old age. It may be, therefore, that the Jaina tradition of his hundred years of life is not far from the mark.
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