Luigi Pio Tessitori
This essay by Dr. Luigi Pio Tessitory was completed on 16th November, 1917 at Bikaner and published by Shri Vriddhichandraji Jain Sabha.
II.
The chaturmāsa of the year 1900 was spent in Mahuwa, Dharma Vijaya's native place. Since his consecration as a monk in 1887, he had never been in his native place again. When he arrived there in 1900, he found his father dead, but his mother and his sisters and others of his relatives were still living, and as he entered the village at the head of his monks, they all came with the people of the village to meet him and to reverence him. What mixed feelings of pride and of sorrowful affection must have agitated his mother's breast, when she saw him whom she had given birth to, return in the garb of a begging monk, bare-headed and bare-footed, but triumphant in his humbleness, happy in his destituteness; when she saw all the population of the village crowd the streets and join their hands and bow to that son of hers; when she thought that that son was no longer her son, that she could no longer clasp him in her arms, nor receive him in her house, nor prepare for him a dainty meal, but had to content herself with bowing to him and giving him her alms in his wooden bowl. And who of the villagers would have recognized in that monk of the serene face and saintly appearance, the naughty Mūla Chandra whom they had seen playing in the streets, and climbing trees, and throwing stones, and quarrelling with the other children of the village, - the bad youth who used to sit in his father's shop and cast dice, and gamble, and squander his father's money.
During the four months spent in Mahuwa, Dharma Vijaya consecrated two new monks - the example of his life had not been without efficacy -, and founded a library. Another library he founded at Viramgam the next year. But by this time a broad design had entered into Dharma Vijaya's mind, and after having well matured it, he thought he must now proceed to put it into execution. Zealous as he had always been of the revival and propagation of the religion in which he was a convinced behever, he had realized that the only road leading to such a revival was through a scientific study of the Jain literature and philosophy, and had thought of founding a College, in which students would learn - besides Sanskrit - Prakrit, the language of the Jain sacred books, which had long been neglected as a language, and almost forgotten. - This plan, which he had long cherished, he was first able to put into execution, on a small scale, at Mandal in Gujarat, where with the help of ten scholars he had assembled, he opened in the year 1902 a school, which after the name of the great Jain polygraph of the seventeenth century, Yaśo Vijaya, he called the Yaśovijaya Jaina Pāthasālā. - But Mandal was not a place where a College on the lines intended by him could prosper, and he soon thought of removing it to a more central place, and selected for it Benares, the traditional seat of brahmanic learning, the heart of Hinduism.
It was a very audacious and almost mad idea for a Jain sādhu to go and found a Jain college in a country and in a city where Jain monks had not been seen for centuries, and where Jainism was generally unknown, and any attempt to re-import it was sure to meet with the most strenuous opposition. - All those, to whom Dharma Vijaya manifested his idea, dissuaded him, and represented to him the difficulties which seemed to render that idea impracticable: - how to cross that vast stretch of country barefooted, where to obtain alms, where to find shelter amongst people, determinedly hostile, who had never heard of a Jain monk and who, even if they meant to be kind to them, did not know what food was fit for them to eat and what not, how to cross the forests and the rivers which barred the road, and after reaching their destination, how to overcome the hostility of the brahmins who would certainly give them no quarter and no rest.
It really seemed to be a mad attempt, but Dharma Vijaya was not mad, and his future success proved it. He remained unshaken in his determination, and one day with six monks and a dozen pupils, and no other conveyance but his bare feet and his walking rod, no other luggage but the wooden bowl in his hand, and the bundle of manuscripts on his shoulder, no other guide but his faith, he was seen by the people of Gujarat to set off on the road to Benares.
The difficulties of the road soon grew so great that his followers became disheartened and begged of him that he should turn back. In places, the distance between one village and another was a full day's march, and after they had reached the village, fatigued by the journey, and hungry and thirsty, who was there to give them as alms the pure vegetable food that a Jain sādhu is only allowed to take, the strained hot water that a Jain sādhu is only allowed to drink? But nothing could shake Dharma Vijaya's faith. He perhaps had before his mind the vision of the first āchāryas who were crossing the plains of Hindustan in all the directions to propagate the religion of the Jina, amongst hostile people, in the territories of hostile rulers who would consider them as pernicious heretics and persecute them and even imprison and torture them; he confided in the goodness of his cause, and he went on. Making his way through Rajgadh, Ujjain, Maksiji, Sajapur, Gunan ki Chhawni, Sipri, Jhansi, Kalpi, and Cawnpur, and preaching in all these different places, he at last reached Benares the day of the Aksaya tritlyā of Vaiśakha of the year Samvat 1959 (1903 CE).
The first days spent in Benares were very trying. The pious Hindus of the place would of course do nothing for the heretical monks who had come from Gujarat; those who knew something about the Jain religion would call them Mlechchhas and nāstikas, and all would say that they were untouchable and outcasts and should be avoided. With difficulty Dharma Vijaya succeeded in obtaining a shelter in a small dilapidated dharmasālā in Sut Tola, and that wretched building was the headquarters of the Yaśovijaya Jaina Pāthaśālā for the first nine months. But in the meanwhile a search for a suitable building had been made and this was found at last in the Nandan Sahu Muhalla, where a large building known under the name of Angrejī Kothī was on sale. The building was purchased by Vira Chanda Dipa Chanda and Gokula Bhāī Mūla Chanda, two devout seths of Bombay, and presented to the Pāthaśālā. Here the College rapidly prospered, the number of students rose at once to fifty and sixty, the funds necessary for the upkeep were enlarged by contributions, the facilities afforded to students were increased by the creation of a library named the Hemachandrāchārya Jaina Pustakālaya, under the care of Dharma Vijaya's first disciple, Indra Vijaya.
But if one were to think that the foundation of the Pāṭhaśālā absorbed all Dharma Vijaya's attention whilst in Benares, he would little know of Dharma Vijaya's wonderful activities. Ever since his arrival in Benares, evening after evening, he had been visiting with his monks the most frequented places in the city and had been preaching to the crowd, not with a view to ponvert any, for he knew the Hindus of to-day to be so blindly obstinate in their inveterate beliefs that not even a miracle in daylight would convert them, but with a view to make the noble principles of the Jain religion known to people who had never heard about them, to correct their erroneous ideas, to win their sympathies and overcome their diffident and unreasonable hostility, and last but not least, to inculcate in their minds the precept of ahimsā, which he believes to be of a universal value and would like to see observed by men of all countries and creeds.
His sermons, which were delivered with that forcible and at the same time simple eloquence of which he possesses the mastery, attracted every day more hearers; he soon became the talk of the city, his arguments were discussed by the pandits in their conversations, every one wanted to go and hear him at least for once. One day the Maharaja of Benares sent for him; and he went with his monks and with his students to the Palace, and there before the Maharaja and a circle of pandits who had there assembled, he made a lucid exposition of the Jain religion, showing how the five cardinal precepts of Jainism - do not kill, do not lie, do not steal, do not be greedy, do not fornicate, are the same as those in which the Hindus themselves believe; explaining that the Jains do not teach anything repugnant to the religious susceptibility of the Hindus, nor anything subversive; on the contrary, they teach obedience to the paramount power and respect to all individuals irrespective of station and caste, and pleading that they should also be treated with the same broad tolerance with which they treat others.
The Maharaja, though a very orthodox Hindu himself, was so pleased with the foreign monks and with their noble efforts that from that day he began to take a very keen interest in the Pāṭhaśālā and to encourage its growth by all sympathetic means. In this way the fame of Dharma Vijaya rapidly spread, and in the year 1906 he was amongst the savants invited to attend the Sanātana Dharma Mahāsabhā which was to be held on the occasion of the Kumbha Mela at Prayāga (Allahabad). He accepted the invitation, thinking that it was a good opportunity to speak about the Jain religion and awaken interest in it, and that he succeeded in this is proved by the fact that after the sabhā the Maharaja of Darbhanga, who was present there, invited Dharma Vijaya to his bungalow and questioned him about the points of difference between Jainism and Buddhism.
There is a saying that as waters are good only when flowing, so Jain monks are good only when wandering. All Dharma Vijaya's objects in Benares had been accomplished, and he now thought he must resume his peregrinations and go and sow the peaceful seed of Jainism in other countries. He thought of Magadha (Bihar), the country sacred in history as the cradle of Jainism, the country where Mahāvīra was born, and preached, and attained omniscience and mokṣa, the country which had since been reconverted to brahmanism, and in which, besides a few places of antiquarian interest, nothing more remained to record the ancient faith. What an opportunity for a Jain monk to visit that country, make a pilgrimage to the places sanctified by the life of Mahāvīra, and re-echo in the air the sound of his words which had long died and gone forgotten! After the rains of the same year 1906, with four monks and twenty students from the Pāṭhaśālā, Dharma Vijaya left Benares bound for Magadha.
At Ara, where he found a few Jains of the Digambara sect, he stopped a few days to preach to them, then he proceeded to Patna. Here he was joined by the other students of the Pāṭhaśālā and with them all he made the pilgrimage to the Jain tīrthas of Bihar, Pavapuri, Kundanpur, Rajgahi, Gunaya, Khatriyakund, and lastly Sammetaśikhara (Parswanath Hill), the most sacred of all the tīrthas, the mountain on which not less than twenty out of the twenty-four Tīrthaṅkaras are believed to have attained the mokṣa. But he would not stop here. He saw lying before him the vast country of Bengal where the precept of ahiṁsā was most disregarded, and he would not suffer to turn back without sowing a few words of peace in that virgin soil.
Undeterred by the local difficulties, which in Bengal for a Jain monk were greater than anywhere else, and by a varicose trouble which made walking a torture, he continued his journey as far as Calcutta. - Here he found a number of devout laymen amongst the Marwari community, but he was not contented with preaching to them; he preached also to the Bengalis, and had the satisfaction to see several babus renounce the eating of fish after his advice. The arguments which he used against his opponents to show that the respect for all forms of animal life is enjoined even by the brahmanic śastras, are embodied in a pamphlet which he wrote in Hindi under the title of Ahiṁsādigdarśana.
One argument is very ingenious. To silence those who were trying to justify the sacrifice of goats to the Kālī Mātā with the authority of a passage from the Durgā Saptati where it is said that the Mātā should be worshipped with “animals, flowers, and perfumes,” [2] he argued that offering does not mean slaying, and that in the same way as the flowers are offered intact and then thrown away, so the victims should be offered intact and then let loose. In Calcutta he consecrated five new monks from amongst the twenty students who had followed him from Benares, and one of these was Vidyā Vijaya, one of Dharma Vijaya's most distinguished disciples.
Fecund of results as his visit to Bengal had been, Dharma Vijaya realized that these results would be only transitory if the efforts which had brought them about were not continued. The best means to secure a continuation of these efforts was in his opinion to found a Gurukula in some quiet village of Bengal or Bihar, where brahmin students would receive an education imbued with the philanthropical principles of Jainism, and on leaving the school after their training, would carry with them these principles and spread the knowledge of them throughout the country. The idea was perhaps more plausible than practicable, but Dharma Vijaya had already collected the funds necessary for its realization and the Gurukula would have risen at Pava, the place sanctified by the nirvana of Mahāvīra if the decaying state of the Yaśovijaya Jaina Pāṭhaśālā had not required his immediate return to Benares.
Before leaving Bengal, he availed himself of the easy opportunity which the proximity of the place offered him for visiting Nadiya, the town of the celebrated logicians, logic being a discipline in which he is personally well versed and most interested. On reaching Benares, he found his Pāṭhaśālā in a most deplorable condition. During his absence, in spite of the efforts of the teachers, the number of the students had decreased from fifty and over to only five or six. He realized that the disaffection of the students was due to the excessive burden imposed upon them by the contemporaneous compulsory study of disparate and all difficult subjects, and lost no time in remedying the evil by remodelling the entire curriculum in such a way as to allow a certain amount of specialization. The reform was very successful and the Pāṭhaśālā has been flourishing ever since.