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JAINISM
the imagination should be permitted to go in following the line of the Tīrthankaras. Obviously, however, the dates assigned by Jaina tradition have to be rejected once we pass beyond Pārsvanātha; for Aristanemi is said to havc lived eighty-four thousand years before Pārsvanātha, which would place us back somewhere in the Lower Paleolithic, while the preceding Tīrthankara, Nami (whose emblem is the blue lotus and whose color is golden), is supposed to have died fifty thousand years before Aristanemi-back, that is to say, in the Eolithic; Suvrata, the twentieth (whose animal is the tortoise and whose color is black), is dated eleven hundred thousand years before that. With Malli, the ninetcenth (whose emblem is the jar and whose color is blue) we pass well into the pre-human geologic ages, while Ara, Kunthu, śānti, Dharma, Ananta, Vimala, etc., transport us beyond the reaches even of geological calculation.
The long series of these semi-mythological saviors, stretching back, period beyond period, each illuminating the world according to the requirements of the age yet in strict adherence to the one doctrine, points to the belief that the Jaina religion is eternal. Again and again it has been revealed and refreshed, in each of the endlessly successive ages, not merely by the twenty-four Tīruhankaras of the present "descending" series, but by an endless number, world without end. The length of life and the stature of the Tīrtharkaras themselves in the most favorable phases of the ever-revolving cycles (the first periods of the descending and the last of the ascending series) are fabulously great; for in the good old days the bodily size and strength as well as the virtue of mankind far exceeded anything that we know today. That is why the images of the Tīrthankaras are colossal. The dwarfish proportions of the men and heroes of the inferior ages are the result and reflex of a diminution of moral stamina. Today we are no longer giants; indeed, we are so small, both physically and spiritually, that the religion of the Jainas has become too difficult, and there will be no more
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