According to John Hick (1982), the story of religion is one in which the divine gradually has been more and more fully revealed. In his perspective on the history of religion, the early period of religious life was incomplete, with tribal gods and goddesses who were more human projection than divine revelation.
For him, that changed when the world religions were born during the axial period and beyond. Karl Jaspers defined the axial period, or axial age, as that time from approximately 800 B.C.E. To 200 B.C.E. When the first world religions were born that stemmed primarily from individual revelatory experiences. This included Confucius in China, the Hebrew prophets, and Gautama the Buddha and Mahavira, the founder of the Jains, in India.
That is one perspective on world religious history, and one that tends to favor Semitic monotheism as the "highest" form of religion. However, another perspective is the more pluralist tradition of India which relied on a continuing evolution, rather than revolutionary change. It was change with continuity, as Gurumurthy (1994) put it, with the move "from ritualistic life, to agnostic Buddhism, to the Ahimsa of Mahavira, to the intellect of Sankara, to the devotion of Ramnuja, and finally to the modern movements of social reform" (p. 52). The focus in the following pages is on the Ahimsa of Mahavira, or the development and evolution of Jainism in India.
The history of religion is rife with parallels in the story of revelations and encounters with the gods. The story of Jainism continues that tendency with the parallels between the story of Mahavira and Buddha.
The stories of the Buddha and Mahavira unfold during about the same period of time. Dates for Gautama are generally listed as either 624 544 BCE or 564 484 BCE. On the other hand, the dates for Mahavira are either 599 527 BCE or 540 468 BCE.
Both the Buddha and Mahvira were born into the same caste. Mahavira was born int...