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JAINISM moments (one to forty-eight) or seven thousand years; that of an air-atom, one moment or three thousand years.
This elaborate systematization of the forms of life, which the Jainas share with Gosāla, is based on the distribution of the ten faculties among the various bcings, from the living elemental atoms to the organisms of men and gods. The systematization is anything but primitive. It is quaint and archaic indeed, yet pedantic and extremely subtle, and represents a fundamentally scientific conception of the world. In fact one is awed by the glimpse that it gives of the long history of human thought-a view much longer and more imposing than the one that is cherished by our Western humanists and academic historians with their little story about the Greeks and the Renaissance. The twenty-fourth Jaina Tīruhankara, Mahāvīra, was roughly a contemporary of Thales and Anaxagoras, the earliest of the standard line of Greek philosophers; and yet the subtle, complex, thoroughgoing analysis and classification of the features of nature which Mahāvīra's teaching took for granted and upon which it played was already centuries (perhaps even millenniums) old. It was a systematization that had long done away with the hosts of powerful gods and the wizard-magic of the still earlier priestly tradition--which itself had been as far above the really primitive level of lauman culture as are the arts of agriculture, herding, and dairying above those of hunting and fishing, root and berry gathering. The world was already old, very wise and very learned, when the speculations of the Greeks produced the texts that are studied in our universities as the first chapters of philosophy.
According to the archaic science the whole cosmos was alive, and the basic laws of its lise were constant throughout. One should therefore practice "non-violence" (ahiṁsā) even upon the smallest, mutest, least conscious living being. The Jaina monk, for example, avoids as far as possible the squeezing or touching of the atoms of the elements. He cannot cease breath
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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 |