Jainism Carving Its Own Path
The name Jain derives from jina(“victory”); Jainism is literally the religion of the “victorious one” — a tag befitting any human being who by her own effort has conquered the lower passions and thus become free of attachments to things.
The Tirthankaras
Many Jains believe that their faith was founded by a lineage of twenty-four teacher-saints, known as the Tirthankaras. The Tirthankaras have offered human beings a means to cross the ocean of samsara (the cycle of existence), which was the subject of the last chapter. Chief among these Tirthankaras — in fact, he was the last of the twenty-four — was the Jain leader Mahavira, who lived 599–527
Tenets of Jainism
According to Jainism, spiritual progress is made through accomplishments in a person's own life. For one, Jainism rejects the idea of castes. Like Buddhism, Jainism broke free from the restraints of the Vedas and emphasized that no matter what a person's station in life — no matter what level of the caste she occupied — if she lived properly, she might find release.
Jainism's views on the Vedas differ from those of Hindus, and should be viewed as a separate religion unto itself. At the same time, its views of karma and samsara give its doctrine more than a little in common with the Indian thought that preceded it. Jainism rejected the idea that persons achieved release from life by offering sacrifices to the gods or by other forms of worship.
Jainism redirected the focus from attention to the gods to a personal philosophy. One such philosophy was asceticism. Asceticism is the belief that people should deny and even conquer their desires. The strong version of this belief is that people should deny all desires without exception. The weaker version of this doctrine is that people should only deny the base desires of the body, like extreme lust, lasciviousness, and sensuousness, and of the world, such as the desire for material possessions, fame, and achievement.
According to Jainism, the more someone denies pleasures and satisfactions of the body, the more she is able to achieve freedom from the endless cycle of birth and rebirth. The founders of Jainism went beyond the traditional Indian moral concern for cattle. They taught that all forms of life were sacred; all manner of life should be loved and preserved wherever possible. This doctrine of love and nonviolence toward all things is known as ahimsa.
“Ahimsa” means “nonkilling.” This concept is primarily associated with the Jains. The notion of ahimsa is applied toward animal life primarily, but in Jain philosophy is recognized in the case of plants also. Mohandas Gandhi admitted that his regard for all life was inspired by the Jain's practice of ahimsa toward all things.
