To the Jain eternal matter stands opposed to eternal spirits, for (opposed to pantheism) every material entity (even water) has its own individual spirit.

The Jain's Nirv[=a]na, as Barth has said, is escape from the body, not escape from existence.[11] Like the Buddhist the Jain believes in reincarnation, eight births, after one has started on the right road, being necessary to the completion of perfection.

Both sects, with the Brahmans, insist on the non-injury doctrine, but in this regard the Jain exceeds his Brahmanical teacher's practice.

Both heretical sects claim that their reputed founders were the last of twenty-four or twenty-five prophets who preceded the real founder, each successively having become less monstrous (more human) in form.
The Jain literature left to us is quite large[12] and enough has been published already to make it necessary to revise the old belief in regard to the relation between Jainism and Buddhism.
We have said that Jainism stands nearer to Brahmanism (with which, however, it frequently had quarrels) than does Buddhism.[13] The most striking outward sign of this is the weight laid on asceticism, which is common to Brahmanism and Jainism but is repudiated by Buddhism.
Twelve years of asceticism are necessary to salvation, as thinks the Jain, and this self-mortification is of the most stringent sort.

But it is not in their different conception of a Nirv[=a]na release rather than of annihilation, nor in the S[=a]nkhya-like[14] duality they affect, nor yet in the prominence given to self-mortification that the Jains differ most from the Buddhists.