Right conduct is based on the five vows taken by every Jain ascetic, (1) not to kill, (2) not to speak untruth, (3) to take nothing that is not given, (4) to observe chastity, (5) to renounce all pleasure in external objects.  These vows receive an extensive and strict interpretation by means of five explanatory clauses applicable to each and to be construed with reference to deed, word, and thought, to acting, commanding and consenting.  Thus the vow not to kill forbids not only the destruction of the smallest insect but also all speech or thought which could bring about a quarrel, and the doing, causing or permitting of any action which could even inadvertently injure living beings, such as carelessness in walking.  Naturally such rules can be kept only by an ascetic, and in addition to them asceticism is expressly enjoined.  It is either internal or external.  The former takes such forms as repentance, humility, meditation and the suppression of all desires:  the latter comprises various forms of self-denial, culminating in death by starvation.  This form of religious suicide is prescribed for those who have undergone twelve years’ penance and are ripe for Nirvana[260] but it is wrong if adopted as a means of shortening austerities.  Numerous inscriptions record such deaths and the head-teachers of the Digambaras are said still to leave the world in this way.

Important but not peculiar to Jainism is the doctrine of the periodical appearance of great teachers who from time to time restore the true faith[261].  The same idea meets us in the fourteen Manus, the incarnations of Vishnu, and the series of Buddhas who preceded Gotama.  The Jain saints are sometimes designated as Buddha, Kevalin, Siddha, Tathagata and Arhat (all Buddhist titles) but their special appellation is Jina or conqueror which is, however, also used by Buddhists[262].  It was clearly a common notion in India that great teachers appear at regular intervals and that one might reasonably be expected in the sixth century B.C.  The Jains gave preference or prominence to the titles Jina or Tirthankara:  the Buddhists to Buddha or Tathagata.

2

According to the Jain scriptures all Jinas are born in the warrior caste, never among Brahmans.  The first called Rishabha, who was born an almost inexpressibly[263] long time ago and lived 8,400,000 years, was the son of a king of Ayodhya.  But as ages elapsed, the lives of his successors and the intervals which separated them became shorter.  Parsva, the twenty-third Jina, must have some historical basis[264].  We are told that he lived 250 years before Mahavira, that his followers still existed in the time of the latter:  that he permitted the use of clothes and taught that four and not five vows were necessary[265].  Both Jain and Buddhist scriptures support the idea that Mahavira was a reviver and reformer rather than an originator.  The former do not emphasize the novelty of his revelation and the latter treat Jainism as a well-known form of error without indicating that it was either new or attributable to one individual.