India, Cont.

As to kind, the rules seemed reasonable; but as to degree of application, they presented some problems. For example, while ahimsa (causing no harm to living things) obliged Jains to be vegetarians, that same rule also proscribed any eating or drinking after sundown and before sunrise lest in the dark one should swallow an innocent insect. It also prohibited bathing since, while submerged, one might drown one's innocent lice and so on. The simple act of walking became an occasion of great distress for in the course of setting one's foot down an innocent ant might interpose itself between sole and ground. The price of even the tiniest failure was excruciatingly high. Jains believed in karma the way no one before or since has entertained that pernicious notion. One false move and a Jain could find himself committed to rebirth as a snowflake or a pebble or a flea ....and try working your way up from those abysmal depths! Eons of miserable existence were required before a soul again attained male human birth and the chance to free itself from the endless round of reincarnations. (Since women were incapable of conquering themselves, they were not permitted to train for the ultimate, solitary assault upon the high reaches of salvation. They could become 'nuns'- which even today is an all too frequent euphemism for 'housekeepers.' But if they were very good females they were sure to be reincarnated as males.) Jainism was clearly not for everyone. Yet, people flocked to join it.

In the sixth century B.C., Jainist ranks swelled under the dynamic leadership of another Kshatriya nobleman who preferred the purgations of asceticism to the sumptuous board of his family's home. An adept of heroic accomplishments (hence his name, Mahavira... Great Hero), he proselytized with particular success. And Jainism, bleak and frightening as it was, became a formidable movement.

A few members of the Vaishya caste also managed to involve themselves in religious matters. Inclined to see things from a materialistic point of view, these merchants proclaimed that all metaphysical speculation was bunk. They developed the Charvaka and Lokayatika schools which asserted that this world was the only world anyone was ever likely to know and this life was the only life anyone was ever likely to live and a person would have to be a damned fool not to take the cash in hand and spend his profits on his pleasure. To them, unsecured promises of future payment had the same degree of reliability in religion as they had in business. But hedonism, then as now, requires a man to be able to afford all his pleasures and, if able to afford them, not to exhaust their delightful novelty. Boredom is ever the enemy of extravagance. Both schools of thought were largely unattended.

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