No religion prevails unless it appeals to some chord, if not of the human heart everywhere, at least of the particular human hearts to which it is directed. In the West a religion based on Vegetarianism would not have a chance. Not that there exists no trace of the life-preserving instinct among Western peoples—far from that. All nice children have it and all saints of the type of him of Assisi. Other people have it who are neither children, nor saints, nor yet lunatics (“though by your smiling you seem to say so”). I know an old hero of the Siege of Delhi who to this day would stoop to lift a worm from his path. But the sentiment, which in the West is rather a secret thing, forming a sort of freemasonry among those who feel it, asserts its sway in the East in the broad light of day. No one there would mind giving the fullest publicity to his opinion that the scorpion has as good a right to live undisturbed in his domestic ant-hill as you have in your suburban villa.
Long before the Jainas made _Ahimsa_ a gateway to perfection, innumerable Asiatics practised and even preached the very same rule. It was the bond of union between all the religious teachers and ascetics who constituted a well-defined feature in Indian life from remote if not from the earliest antiquity. The founders of Jainism and of Buddhism, too, were Gurus like the rest, only they possessed an intensified magnetic influence and, at least in Buddha’s case, an unique genius. Every Eastern religion has been taught by a Guru, not excepting the most divine of them all.[4]
“It is stated of the Divine Founder of the Christian religion that without a parable spoke He not to the people. Christ, in fact, acted and taught as an _Oriental Guru_, a character which none of the European writers of Christ’s life has invested Him with” (Rev. J. Long: v. “Oriental Proverbs” in the Report of the Proceedings of the Second Congress of Orientalists).
In the occurrence of a new religious evolution much depends on the individual, but much also on the fulness of time. When Buddhism and Jainism arose, the psychological moment was come for a change or modification in the current faith. To some degree, both were a revolt against Sacerdotalism. Men were told that they could work out their salvation without priestly aid or intervention. The new teachers, though each springing from the class of the feudal nobility, won to their side the surging wave of the only kind of democratic yearning which, till now, Asia has known—the yearning for religious equality. Professor Hermann Jacobi (the foremost authority on Jainism, to whom all who study the subject owe an unbounded debt) suggests that there was a certain friction between the highly meritorious of the noble and the priestly castes because the priests were inclined to look down on the layman saint. To this category belonged Sakya Muni, who was the younger son of a prince, or, as we should say, a feudal lord, and who renounced rank and riches to become a recluse. The same family history is told of Mahavira, whom the Jainas claim to be their founder. For a long time Europeans believed the two religions to have but one source, and Jainism was dismissed as a Buddhist sect. The Jainas, however, always strongly held that they had a founder of their own, namely, Mahavira, and they even declared that Buddha was not his master but his disciple. After much research, Professor Jacobi decided the case in their favour by assigning to them a separate origin. Both Sakya Muni and Mahavira are generally believed to have flourished in the sixth century B.C.