Jainism

According to John Hick (1982), the story of religion is one in which the divine gradually has been more and more fully revealed. In his perspective on the history of religion, the early period of religious life was incomplete, with tribal gods and goddesses who were more human projection than divine revelation.

For him, that changed when the world religions were born during the axial period and beyond. Karl Jaspers defined the axial period, or axial age, as that time from approximately 800 B.C.E. To 200 B.C.E. When the first world religions were born that stemmed primarily from individual revelatory experiences. This included Confucius in China, the Hebrew prophets, and Gautama the Buddha and Mahavira, the founder of the Jains, in India.

That is one perspective on world religious history, and one that tends to favor Semitic monotheism as the "highest" form of religion. However, another perspective is the more pluralist tradition of India which relied on a continuing evolution, rather than revolutionary change. It was change with continuity, as Gurumurthy (1994) put it, with the move "from ritualistic life, to agnostic Buddhism, to the Ahimsa of Mahavira, to the intellect of Sankara, to the devotion of Ramnuja, and finally to the modern movements of social reform" (p. 52). The focus in the following pages is on the Ahimsa of Mahavira, or the development and evolution of Jainism in India.

The history of religion is rife with parallel

protest was reflected in mainstream Hinduism itself by its reformation and the writing of the Bhagavad Gita. Both also focused on the use of meditation, reflectivity, and interiority as the means to discover the nature of all reality. As Panikkar (1989) noted, both began with human meditation on the human subject of that meditation in order to understand the nature of reality. Mahavira's ultimate revelation was somewhat different than that of the Buddha. While the Buddha promulgated teachings about the Middle Way, Mahavira preached the doctrine of total renunciation and total nonviolence. His was not the Middle Way. Mahavira also taught that there were two basic kinds of substances, jivas and ajivas. Jivas are souls or spirits, while ajivas is inorganic matter. Jivas are the substance that is important and karma determines how the soul is reborn. If the individual lives a materialistic life, then a materialistic karma body will form around that individual, determining the incarnation. In order for the individual to reach liberation, or moksha, that individual must eliminate the karma body by eliminating passions and sense experience. One of the ultimate attainments for the Jain is to starve himself or herself to death wh