THE JAINS[251]

1

Before leaving pre-Buddhist India, it may be well to say something of the Jains.  Many of their doctrines, especially their disregard not only of priests but of gods, which seems to us so strange in any system which can be called a religion, are closely analogous to Buddhism and from one point of view Jainism is part of the Buddhist movement.  But more accurately it may be called an early specialized form of the general movement which culminated in Buddhism.  Its founder, Mahavira, was an earlier contemporary of the Buddha and not a pupil or imitator[252].  Even had its independent appearance been later, we might still say that it represents an earlier stage of thought.  Its kinship to the theories mentioned in the last chapter is clear.  It does not indeed deny responsibility and free will, but its advocacy of extreme asceticism and death by starvation has a touch of the same extravagance and its list of elements in which physical substances and ideas are mixed together is curiously crude.

Jainism is atheistic, and this atheism is as a rule neither apologetic nor polemical but is accepted as a natural religious attitude.  By atheism, of course, a denial of the existence of Devas is not meant; the Jains surpass, if possible, the exuberant fancy of the Brahmans and Buddhists in designing imaginary worlds and peopling them with angelic or diabolical inhabitants, but, as in Buddhism, these beings are like mankind subject to transmigration and decay and are not the masters, still less the creators, of the universe.  There were two principal world theories in ancient India.  One, which was systematized as the Vedanta, teaches in its extreme form that the soul and the universal spirit are identical and the external world an illusion.  The other, systematized as the Sankhya, is dualistic and teaches that primordial matter and separate individual souls are both of them uncreated and indestructible.  Both lines of thought look for salvation in the liberation of the soul to be attained by the suppression of the passions and the acquisition of true knowledge.

Jainism belongs to the second of these classes.  It teaches that the world is eternal, self-existent and composed of six constituent substances:  souls, dharma, adharma, space, time, and particles of matter[253].  Dharma and adharma are defined by modern Jains as subtle substances analogous to space which make it possible for things to move or rest, but Jacobi is probably right in supposing that in primitive speculation the words had their natural meaning and denoted subtle fluids which cause merit and demerit.  In any case the enumeration places in singular juxtaposition substances and activities, the material and the immaterial.  The process of salvation and liberation is not distinguished from physical processes and we see how other sects may have drawn the conclusion, which apparently the Jains did not draw, that human action is necessitated