The advantage gained for Indian history from the conclusion that Jainism
and Buddhism are two contemporary sects--having arisen in the same
district,--is no small one. First, this conclusion shows that the
religious movement of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. in eastern India
must have been a profound one. If not only one, but certainly two, and
perhaps more reformers, appeared at the same time, preaching teachers, who
opposed the existing circumstances in the same manner, and each of whom
gained no small number of followers for their doctrines, the desire to
overthrow the Brahmanical order of things must have been generally and
deeply felt. This conclusion shows then that the transformation of the
religious life in India was not merely the work of a religious community.
Many strove to attain this object although separated from one another. It
is now recognisable, though preliminarily, in one point only, that the
religious history of India from the fifth century B.C. to the eighth or
ninth A.D. was not made up of the fight between Brahmanism and Buddhism
alone. This conclusion allows us, lastly, to hope that the thorough
investigation of the oldest writings of the Jainas and their relations
with Buddhism on the one hand and with Brahmanism on the other will afford
many important ways of access to a more exact knowledge concerning the
religious ideas which prevailed in the sixth and fifth centuries B.
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