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Similar to Buddhism in many respects, Jainism is one of the most ancient religions of the world. It emerged from the same heterodox classical Indian world of the Ganges basin in the early centuries B.C. Like Buddhism, it was a partly a reaction to Brahminical caste consciousness, but the faith of the Jains is slightly more ancient and much more demanding than Buddhist practice. Unlike Buddhism, the Jain religion never spread beyond India, and while it was once a popular and powerful faith across the subcontinent, patronized by the princes of a succession of Deccani dynasties, today there are only four million Jains left. In contrast to Buddhism, Jainism is almost unknown in the West.
The word Jain derives from Jina, meaning liberator or spiritual conqueror. The Jinas or Tirthankaras- were a series of twenty-four human teachers who each discovered how to escape the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Through their heroic Tapasya-bodily austerities- they gained omniscient and transcendent knowledge which revealed to them the nature of the reality of the great theatre of the universe, in every dimension. The most recent of those, according to the Jains, was the historical figure of Mahavira (599-529 B.C.) - the Great Hero - a prince of Magadha, in modem Bihar, who renounced the world at the age of thirty to become a wandering thinker and ascetic. He elaborated to his followers a complex cosmological system that the Jains still expound 2,600 years later. Like followers of other Indian faiths, they believe in an immortal and indestructible soul or Jivan, and that the sum of one's actions determines the nature of one's future rebirth. However, the Jains diverge from Hindus and Buddhists in many ways. They reject the Hindu idea that the world was created or destroyed by omnipotent gods.