Buddhism and Jainism: Teachings, Councils and Exam Facts

Buddhism and Jainism grew out of the same churning of the middle Ganga plain in the sixth century BCE, and every exam family draws questions from them: a date, a place, a council, a vow or a text. Both faiths rejected the Vedic sacrifice, the ritual monopoly of the priests and the use of Sanskrit for worship, preached in the language ordinary people spoke, and admitted men and women of every varna into their orders. Because the two stories run in parallel, paper setters test whether a candidate can keep them apart.

Why new faiths appeared in the sixth century BCE

Iron ploughshares and wet paddy gave the middle Ganga plain a farm surplus, and the surplus gave it towns, punch-marked coins and a class of traders. The merchant, the setthi and the gahapati had money but no rank in the varna order, and the new faiths offered them respect and a moral code that protected the cattle farming depended on. Buddhist texts count sixty-two schools of thought in this age; besides Buddhism and Jainism the important one was the Ajivika sect of Makkhali Gosala, which taught strict determinism and was patronised by Ashoka and his grandson Dasharatha.

Gautama Buddha: the life exams test

Before his enlightenment he studied under Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta and then practised severe austerity for six years, which he abandoned after Sujata offered him a bowl of rice milk. Early Buddhist art never showed him in human form, and papers ask for the substitutes: the lotus and the bull for the birth, the horse for the renunciation, the Bodhi tree for the enlightenment, the wheel for the first sermon and the stupa for the death.

What the Buddha taught

The core is the Four Noble Truths: the world is full of suffering; suffering is caused by desire; suffering ends when desire ends; and desire ends by following the Eightfold Path. That path is right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration, and because it avoids both indulgence and self-torture it is called the middle path, the madhyama pratipada. The Buddha accepted karma and rebirth but denied a permanent soul, so his two marks of existence are anicca, that everything changes, and anatta, that there is no unchanging self. He was silent about the existence of God. The Buddhist Triratna is the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, and the canon, the Tripitaka, is in Pali: the Vinaya Pitaka on monastic rules, the Sutta Pitaka on sermons and the Abhidhamma Pitaka on philosophy.

The four Buddhist councils

Vardhamana Mahavira and Jainism

Jainism counts twenty-four Tirthankaras. The first was Rishabhadeva, whose symbol is the bull and whose name appears in the Rigveda; the twenty-third was Parshvanatha of Varanasi, son of King Ashvasena, whose symbol is the serpent and who gave his order four vows. The twenty-fourth was Vardhamana Mahavira, born about 540 BCE at Kundagrama near Vaishali to Siddhartha, head of the Jnatrika clan, and Trishala, sister of the Lichchhavi chief Chetaka. He married Yashoda and had a daughter, Priyadarshana, renounced the world at thirty, and after twelve years of austerity attained kaivalya, perfect knowledge, at forty-two under a sal tree at Jrimbhikagrama on the bank of the Rijupalika. From then he was called Jina, the conqueror, and Mahavira, and his followers Nirgranthas, those free of bonds. He died at Pavapuri in Bihar at seventy-two, about 468 BCE.

Jain doctrine, councils and sects

Mahavira added brahmacharya to the four vows he inherited, so Jainism has five: ahimsa, satya, asteya, aparigraha and brahmacharya. Its Triratna is right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, and its theory of knowledge is anekantavada, that reality has many aspects, expressed in the sevenfold formula of syadvada. Jainism denies a creator god but accepts a soul in every being, even in fire and water, which is why its ahimsa is stricter than the Buddhist rule. The first Jain council met at Pataliputra under Sthulabhadra; when Bhadrabahu led a group south to Shravanabelagola during a famine, the order divided into Digambaras, who go naked, and Shvetambaras, who wear white. The second council at Vallabhi in Gujarat, under Devardhi Kshamashramana, wrote the twelve Angas down in Ardhamagadhi Prakrit. Jain kings and patrons include Chandragupta Maurya, Kharavela of Kalinga and the Chalukya and Ganga rulers of the Deccan, and the tradition left the Gommateshwara statue at Shravanabelagola, the Dilwara temples at Mount Abu and the shrines of Girnar and Palitana.