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write history with a New Man. Otherwise it will be such a big job, because every man will be a unique man and he has to have as much space as anybody else.
In the old world, history was possible. You will be surprised to know that before India became a slave country there was no such thing in India as history. Mohammedans started writing history about Mohammedan kings, then Britishers started writing history about the British rule, but before India was independent there was no history. A country so ancient that they had discovered mathematics, astronomy. They had discovered the most scientific language in the world. They had written the best literature, the best poetry. They had created the best architecture -- temples, palaces, memorials, statues which have no comparison anywhere, so alive that it seems the stone statue is just going to breathe again, or perhaps is deceiving you by stopping its breath. So alive!
But they had no history, and nobody has bothered why. My own understanding is that there were so many unique people that to write about all of them would have been an impossible task. So they found a different way of writing history which was called PURANAS, the ancient tales. They don't write about twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas, they only write about Mahavira. But in Mahavira's life everything essential about all the twenty-four tirthankaras is represented. Nothing is missing, so what is the point of writing about twenty-four people? Because Adinatha must have been ten thousand years ago, they write about Mahavira, the best, the last, whom they knew more than any of the others.
If you go into a Jaina temple you will see twenty-four statues of twenty-four tirthankaras, but you will be puzzled: they are all alike, exactly the same. It is impossible, twenty-four persons exactly the same -- the same size of nose, the same eyes, the same long earlobes -- because a Jaina TIRTHANKARA'S lobes should touch the shoulders -- the same height, the same type of athletic body. Strange.... Even Jaina scholars cannot see any difference, so they have made small symbols underneath every statue. Those symbols indicate whose statue it is. For
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