05.07.09

The tirthankars, and a clue to a riddle

Posted in New Age at 5:59 pm by nemo

From The Gurdjieff Con: The 23rd tirthankar

This is an incidental tidbit of information from Wikipedia about Mahavir, Jainism, and the 23rd of twenty-four predecessors to Mahavir. Not a big deal at first sight, but perhaps the answer in plain sight to a considerable riddle, what is the origin of Indic dharma tradition?
I have been thrown off the scent so many times on the question of Indian religion, but am returning quite undogmatically to the original view I developed in the original research for WHEE in the nineties, that Mahavir’s proto-Jain sequence of 24 tirthankars was to the period ca. -3000 to -600 as Buddha (Gautama) was to the period -600 to our times.
Buddhists themselves said as much, but they had no reliable records, of course, nor any grasp of the dynamics involved, content with notions of the ‘wheel of dharma’ being set in motion by Gautama.
Rajneesh, always the source of good high-priced gossip, told many stories of Mahavir in his many many books, off hand anecdotes, and was himself from a Jain sector of India (a significant fact, please note the effort to bypass Hinduism). He claimed that students of Mahavir used to sneak off to witness the Buddha (and vice versa), suggesting strongly that the two were contemporaries.
Jainism, no ism, and not the religion that arose after the passing of Mahavir, in its original form was already ancient by the time that Mahavir lived, and at the rate of three centuries per tirthankar would be very ancient indeed. I question the date for the 23rd, since it would be hard to maintain a living tradition of the complexity of the tirthankar line with examplars so far apart.
Still, who knows?
Nonetheless, there is the possibility that the Jains represent either a pre-Aryan form of Indian religion, or the direct child/grandchild of such a thing, and that this source is the origin of the characteristic dharmas that are unique to the history of religion. What the source is beyond that is hard to fathom. But one sufi tradition (never reliable) speaks of the way ‘the ancients’ created three ways, of which the Indic stream was one.
All this might source back to the Neolithic, which we seriously underestimate. Oral traditions of religion were undoubtedly as robust in that era as written traditions are in ours.

The Buddhist myths of ‘new ages’ of dharma should tell us about what is projected for our own times: a new ‘setting the wheel of dharma’ in motion. But those who think this way are still stuck in the past, and can’t solve the complexity of the problem through repetition.
Meanwhile everyone in the realm of monotheism will be out to destroy this chance, or corrupt it.

Let’s remember what all of that was: world renunciation, living outside of societal institutions. Society is going to close in for the kill here, witness what is happening in Tibet. Tibet, however, in no way represents the mainline of the tradition we see with Mahavir and Buddha. These traditions are unacceptable to the authorities in the type of society we live in.

In any case, it is important to note the way that Jainism as such came into existence after the last of the tirthankars, a somewhat ominous fact. Will the same happen with Buddhism: an age of a Buddhist style religion of laymen, but not Buddhas, as the real tradition moves in a new direction?

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