Jainism and Hinduism

By Amar Salgia

The nineteenth century introduction of the term "Hinduism" is today the source for a variety of confusions and misguided scholarly pursuits among Indians and Westerners alike.  Based upon the sum of all extant historical sources, including those from both traditional histories and living traditions, the right answer to these questions is a categorical *no*. Many works of scholarship have examined the historical, literary and doctrinal evidences demonstrating that Jain tradition began anterior to and independent of the Vedic and later Hindu traditions. 

The reader may be referred to Jyoti Prasad Jain's book entitled **Jainism:  The Oldest Living Religion** (1988:  P.V. Research Institute, Varanasi) for an introduction.  Here, instead, the conceptual basis the views in question shall be examined.  Their sources first need to be studied.

It is important to recognize upfront that neither Jains nor Hindus -- be they scholars, swamis, pundits, monks or the like -- ever treated Jainism as a subsect of Hinduism until the twentieth century:  the era of Hindu proselytization and nationalist politics.  It was not until noted Hindu thinkers, including the famed Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Paramahansa Yogananda, proclaimed to the Western world that India is a single nation of common spirituality, that many other Hindu thinkers assumed a new posture of sectarian hegemony:  the "offshoot" mentality, which has become a staple of post-independence Hindu thought. 

Contemporary Hindu thinkers credit "Hinduism" for everything positive and acclaimed that ever originated in India, including such things as moral virtues, philosophy, language, science and art.  Beginning in the 1960's, with the importations of popular guru-followings into Europe and North America, Hindu scholars have attempted to define and systematize Hinduism into a more or less united creed, often by assimilating it to the familiar Judeo-Christian faiths, while claiming greater perfection on the basis of its being more ancient, liberal, "open-minded" and all-encompassing:  a belief-system whose lack of definition and consistency is somehow its crowning virtue. 

Hindu religious teachers make attempts to supplant other world religions by conforming them to the terminology of "Jnan yoga" (grace through the intellect), "Karma yoga" (grace through works), and "Bhakti yoga" (grace through devotion), as delineated in the much-revered **Bhagavad Gita**.  Jainism and Buddhism, so it is often suggested, constitute Karma yoga and therefore derive from Hinduism.

When dealing with the question of whether or not Jains are actually Hindus, one must not only define a "Jain" but also define "Hindu". Since the field of comparative religion began its development as a social science in the West, the catchall of "Hinduism" has been applied in common reference to Brahmanism, or the Vedic creed, along with any other religious traditions -- however mutually contradictory -- which came to accept Vedic scriptural authority in some form.  Revisionists are proposing new Hindu self-conceptions such as the following from **Dancing with Siva:
Hinduism's Contemporary Catechism**:

From the rich soil of Hinduism long ago sprang various other traditions.  Among them were Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism, which rejected the *Vedas* and thus emerged as completely distinct religions, disassociated from Hinduism, while still sharing many philosophical insights and cultural values with their parent faith.[1]

"Hindu" is a term used by modern Indians mainly in a cultural sense (e.g., Hindu vs. Muslim); or alternately, in reference to a national identity (the state of Hindustan); or, when augmented with the suffix '-ism', in a vague sense of religious creed (the "Hindu faith" or Sanatana Dharma).  While each approach might seem unambiguous by itself, the problem arises from the fact that Indians tend to use these definitions interchangeably, even within a single discourse.  Frequently one hears that Hinduism is the whole of Indian culture; that Hinduism is not a religion, but a way of life; or that a Hindu is any inhabitant of India.  Out of those three statements only the last elicits the actual etymology of the word.  *Hindu* is the Avestan (Old Persian) rendering of *Sindhu*, the term used throughout most of the first millennium, B.C. by the Irani-Aryans to differentiate themselves from the Aryans inhabiting the lands east of the Sindhu River (the Indus River in modern Pakistan).[2]  In the fourth century, B.C., the invading Greeks converted the name of their newly conquered land from the Persian "Hind" to "India".  Thus, anyone whose ancestors were among the Aryans that migrated east of the modern Indus River (that is, any person of Indo-Aryan descent) can logically call oneself a "Hindu" (that is, if the individual chooses to accept a foreign ethnic designator).

So what is *Hinduism*? 

As we know it in the modern world, Hinduism is actually made from the historical synthesis of two independent families of religious traditions:  on one hand, the faith, scripture, social structure and ritualism of the *Brahmanic* (or Vedic) tradition; and on the other hand, the introspectiveness, asceticism, philosophies and conservativeness of the *Shramanic* traditions. 

 This synthesis began around 900 B.C. when the Vedic tribes of Indo-Aryans began to migrate from the northern tributaries of the Indus River to the Shramanic homelands surrounding the Ganges River (in the modern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh).  The first definitive product of Hinduism's development was the collection of books known as the *Upanishads* (600 - 300 B.C.), within which numerous non-Vedic ideas begin to transform the earlier Vedic theology into the first utterances of Hindu thought.[3] 

 Jainism and other Shramanic systems were among the original sources of these non-Vedic beliefs and soteriological practices which have, up to modern times (and especially since the nineteenth century), become synonymous with a popularized concept of Hinduism. 

Such ideas included the concepts of karma, reincarnation, asceticism, belief in an eternal soul, and a non-anthrocentric view of universe -- all of which are absent from the original corpus of Vedic thought.  Owing to the liberalities of the older Vedic henotheism, and during the same initial stages of Hinduism's evolution, more localized divinity-cults (e.g., those of the Shiva and Krishna precursors), apart from the Shramanic and Vedic traditions, were also assimilated into the Brahmanic belief and social systems.  Through the cultural processes involved in Sanskritizing them, the Brahmanic fold started to reconfigure these regional cults and non-Vedic doctrines, absorb them into its established structures, and therewith extend the geographical limits of its cultural and linguistic influence.[4]  From these interactions, and within a changing Brahmanic society, a hybrid Vedic/non-Vedic culture began to grow in both complexity and, over centuries, in its capacity to socially interface with purely non-Vedic religious traditions (such as Jainism).

Now, in the religious sense of the term, can one distinguish between that which is Hindu and that which is not?  Certainly:  all religions and schools of thought which support the authority of the Veda are *Hindu* religions and *Hindu* schools of thought; and all those which do not are considered non-Vedic, non-Brahmanic, and yes, non-Hindu.

Jainism and Buddhism (in addition to being purely Shramanic philosophies) would thereby fall into the non-Hindu category.  Thus, while the ancient Samkhya philosophy shared numerous similarities with Jainism, and although it originated from the realm of Shramanic thought, the early Samkhya thinkers chose to acknowledge Vedic authority; and hence the Samkhya school has been accepted as an "orthodox" system of *Hindu* philosophy, rather than an independent or non-Vedic school of thought. 

Jainism on the other hand, along with Buddhism and the ancient Ajivikas, have been labeled "heterodox" by religious scholars as though they each developed from Hinduism (that is, from a conflux of Vedic and non-Vedic beliefs) only to break from it in reaction to an unsatisfying Hindu orthodoxy.

It is a fact that Jainism originated on the Indian subcontinent.  Its active adherents now number but a few millions, whose mostly Indian members bear racial and cultural constitutions that differ not outstandingly with surrounding populations.  Over the course of centuries, Indian lay Jains have, as part of a social survival mechanism, adopted a number of rites and customs bearing outward similarities with popular Hindu rites and customs.  In fact, it has been well-documented that for the very purpose of reducing their cultural conspicuousness (primarily to avoid religious persecution) the Jain laity, under monastic guidance, appropriated a variety of devotional rituals (in addition to those pertaining to marriage) which were deliberate modelings of established Brahmanic rituals.[5] 

And since the Jain, Hindu and Buddhist traditions have employed a generic Sanskritic vocabulary that includes "karma", "dharma", "samsara", "yoga" and "moksha" -- despite the fact that each system defines them in terms of fundamentally disparate worldviews --  a reductionistic stance has propagated among Indians whereby each tradition has come to be viewed as part of a monolithic, pan-Indian, "Hindu" phenomenon.

Nationalists thus argue that to draw distinctions in the spectrum of Indian thought is to distort Indian culture and promote divisions in the Indian republic. 

On a polemic front they allege that Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and all other religions of Indian origin began from a single, primordially unified Hindu people (usually imagined as a "Vedic spiritual society"); and further that any distinctions between the religions are merely differences in emphasis and preference, rather than purport. 

Some state that while the Brahmanic traditions adopted many features of Shramanic, Buddhist or Jain ideology, the Jain and Buddhist traditions, on the other hand, began to modify and incorporate Hindu deities into their histories and rituals -- the ready conclusion being that all traditions of Indian origin are completely interdependent, and thus unapproachable without a contrived ideological context linking each to all of the others. 

Perceptions of certain types of similarities between traditions, such as those of terminology, ethics or ritual, are typically presented as proof for one tradition being a derivative of another (usually the one with more professed adherents).  In attempting to foster for Jains a greater sense of belonging to an independent Indian nation, in the 1990's even Jain commentators have begun harboring a view of their tradition wherein the last  Tirthankara, Mahavira, is described not in the traditional sense but as a champion of an imagined Hindu reformation. 

Due to similar approaches it has become common for world philosophy and comparative religion texts to classify Jainism as a "Hindu tradition", while attempting little more discussion of its teachings beyond general associations with Hinduism or Buddhism.

What the proponents of this view do not recognize, however, are the mostly unilateral directions which these influences between Brahmanic and Shramanic traditions have historically taken.  While ideologies from the Shramanic traditions, in the forms of metaphysics and soteriology, took  hold and germinated within the mainstreams of Brahmanic thought, the latter has had insignificant if any impact on the Shramanic philosophies; and while a worshipful attitude toward selections from the Hindu pantheon became gradually accepted, though in modified form, by the popular sectors of the Buddhist and Jain traditions, none of the major Hindu traditions have ever promoted an analogous recognition for the Buddhas or  Tirthankaras. 

(Although the Vaishnava Hindu tradition did turn Buddha and the Tirthankara Rishabha into "Vishnu-avataras", like the other minor incarnations they are neither deified nor worshipped in any form.)

Disregarding pre-formed conclusions, the literary and doctrinal evidences most clearly relate that as religious ideology has diffused to Brahmanism from the Shramanic realm, a *hybrid* culture formed from these interactions has come to dominate many of the empirical aspects of Indian life.  And it has been due to this manifested social dynamic that we might perceive overt similarities between the Jain tradition and modern Hinduism:  similarities of ritual and terminology which arise from (1) the natural commonalties that any hybrid culture would facilitate; and (2) the wide diversity of non-Vedic philosophical ideas which (as exemplified by texts including the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita) merged into the amorphous socio-religious system that we have only recently given the label of Hinduism. 

The resemblances between Jainism and Hinduism, then, do not evince common origins but are traceable to actual time periods and discrete events in history wherein interactions were occurring between previously self-isolating traditions.  The historical independence of Jain philosophy, as a unique hallmark of the non-Vedic tradition known as Jainism, thus remains unchallenged.

In summary, common claims such as "Jainism is an offshoot of Hinduism" and "Buddha was a Hindu" are not supported by historical facts or sound doctrinal comparisons. 

They are matters of perception (and largely superficial perceptions at that) which typically draw upon observations of shared social customs and the aforementioned ritualistic similarities.  They are fueled by inaccurate conceptions of *both* Jainism and Hinduism; and, when professed in the guise of religious scholarship, such claims constitute little more than religious chauvinism:  the same chauvinism that modern Hindu thinkers claim that Hinduism lacks.  Were Mahavira and Buddha charismatic populists?  Were they the reformers of an already established Hindu belief system?  Are Jainism and Buddhism offshoots of Hinduism?  Were they each products of a "Hindu" socio-religious system?  Many Hindu thinkers allege just that and, interestingly enough do so in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary from within the Brahmanic tradition itself.  That evidence, when coupled with the apparent need to supplant Jainism (along with the other religions of Indian origin), continues to generate insupportable and self-contradicting portrayals of the tradition. 

In a terse synopsis of Jainism the author of **The Hindu Mind** provides an excellent example of this:

Jainism, an offshoot of Hinduism, is believed to be as ancient as the Vedic religion, since references to two of its twenty-four saints (Tirthankaras), Rishabha and Arishtanemi, are found in the Rigvedic Mantras.  Rishabha, the first of the twenty-four Tirthankaras, is the founder of the original Jain Dharma.... Jainism is one of the theological traditions (sampradayas) of Hinduism and is classified as one of the heterodox schools of Hindu philosophy....Jainism rejects the ritualistic content of the Vedas but does not necessarily deny their higher teachings.[6]
-----

How the Jain religion, having been founded by Rishabha, can be "as ancient" as the Vedas and yet still be an "offshoot" of Hinduism is among the revisionists' standard paradoxes.  Unsubstantiated by ancient traditions or actual texts which might lend support to the notion, the author's appropriation of Jainism as a Hindu "sampradaya" is also a recent
innovation. 

(As a point of information, no final authority is recognized in Jainism beyond the *Kevalin*, or omniscient soul.  Jainism accepts nothing from the Vedic, Vedantic or later Hindu scriptures and recognizes none of the beliefs contained in them as authoritative.  For well over 2500 years Jain tradition has been consistently clear on that point.)

The claim that Jainism began from Hinduism is therefore little more than a claim.  Bearing semantic difficulties which alone preclude its defense, it is an assertion best-suited for furthering social and political agendas; and a belief relying, for its general acceptance, upon ignorance of the historical, literary and doctrinal evidences to the contrary (along with the passivity of the Jain community in affirming otherwise). 

In recent decades some proponents of the "Jains are Hindus" view have assumed patronizing, even antagonistic dispositions towards any notion of Jainism's uniqueness or historical independence.  One could begin a more public process of debunking the offshoot-paradigm by addressing the antagonists with a simple line of questions:

*   First, define "Hindu" and "Hinduism".

*   Based on those definitions, and using both historical and doctrinal evidence, explain *how* Jain philosophy was  derived from the Brahmanic  faith; and, based on that evidence, *how* you deduce that Jains are  and have always been a sub-sect of Hindus, despite the fact that the very notion is almost exclusively a twentieth century phenomenon.

*   In what ways do rituals and social customs have anything to do with being a Jain and following the philosophy and code of conduct taught by Lord Mahavira?  Explicate the respective roles that rituals and social customs assume within Jain cosmology and the philosophy of *Seven Tattvas*, both of which constitute the sum of all that Jainism rests upon.

*   Why is it important for Jains to be convinced that their own religion is neither independent nor unique, but that it is somehow a child of another religion? 

For what reasons must Jains deny and discard their thousands of years of meticulously recorded pre-Mahaviran history, and replace it with this twentieth century claim that "Jains are Hindus"?  Do Jains who identify themselves as  "Hindu" rather than "Jain" gain any special benefits from doing so?

*   Do the Hindu deities symbolize the same ideals of passionlessness, detachment and omniscience which are exemplified by the *Jina*?

Should Jains contradict their own intellectual and spiritual tradition and start praising the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and other major Hindu scriptures, despite the set reasoning against doing so articulated by Lord Mahavira and other Jain leaders throughout every subsequent age?

*   If Jains and Hindus are now, and have always been the same, then why do Hindus thinkers not preach Jain philosophy; or teach from any of the Jain scriptures; or endorse the Jain code of conduct; or worship the ideals embodied as the Lord Jina? 

Why have Jain and Hindu thinkers been engaged in vigorous ideological debates for well over twenty-five centuries?  Why did purist Brahmanic revivals, such as the  Advaita and Bhakti movements, condemn Jainism as a heretical creed?

________________________

1.      Satguru Sivaya Subrahmuniyaswami.  1993:  Himalayan Academy, Concord, CA.  p. 731.  Note the author's reference to Hinduism as a singular "parent faith".

2.      Historical  note:  The Sanskrit word "Aryan" or "Arya" is a proper       linguistic designation, and refers strictly to those peoples who       speak or spoke any of the Indo-Iranian languages which include

        Sanskrit, Prakrit, Persian, Hindi, Gujarati, Panjabi, Sindhi,        Pashto, and many others.  "Aryan" therefore supports no more of        racial connotation than the term "Semite" (as the latter denotes  the native-born speaker of any Semitic language).

3.      Gavin Flood.  **An Introduction to Hinduism**.  1996:  Cambridge        University Press.  p. 40.

4.      Ibid.  p. 148.

5.      Historical note:  The beginnings of this persecution came with theBrahmanical ministry of Shankara, the ninth century founder of the"Advaita", or Non-dualism movement which condemned non-Vedic systems for being heretical creeds.

6.      Bansi Pandit.  1996:  B&V Enterprises, Glen Ellyn (IL).  pp. 87-90.