Page:The Heart of Jainism (IA heartofjainism00stevuoft).djvu/59

 moves on a higher plane of sanctity than one who has known the joys of wedded life.

Jainism, though it denies the existence of a creator and of the three great gods of the Indian Trimūrti, Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva, has never shaken itself free from the belief in many of the minor gods of the Hindu pantheon. It gives these gods, it is true, a very secondary position as servants or tempters of the great Jaina saints, but their existence is accepted as undoubted; accordingly, in the account of Mahāvīra's initiation we shall find many of the old Hindu gods represented as being present.

This initiation, all sects agree, took place when Mahāvīra was about thirty years of age, some time therefore between 570 and 569 The Nāya clan to which he belonged seem to have supported a body of monks who followed the rule of Pārśvanātha, an ascetic who had lived some two hundred and fifty years before Mahāvīra. It was naturally to this order, probably considered rather irregular by the Brāhmans, that the thoughts of Mahāvīra turned. Its monks had their cells in a park outside the Kṣatriya suburb (Kuṇḍagrāma) of Vaiśālī, and in the centre of this park grew one of those evergreen Aśoka or 'sorrowless' trees, whose leaves are supposed never to know either grief or pain. The Aśoka tree is always associated with Mahāvīra, for the legends say that in his later life an Aśoka tree grew wherever he preached, and it was now under its shade that he made the great renunciation and entered upon that ascetic life, whose austerities were to dry up all the founts of karma and free him from the sorrowful cycle of rebirth.

Mahāvīra had fasted for two-and-a-half days, not even allowing water to cross his lips, and had then given away