The Monastic Path
By about 500 B.C., some teachers had moved so far down the path of liberation
that they no longer viewed the standard perception of life in the social world
as valid for the dedicated spiritual devotee. They formed communities of
religious renunciants (shramanas ) who withdrew from the world and
evolved a full-time monastic discipline. The most successful of these early
communities, the Jains (or, in Sanskrit, Jaina) and the Buddhists, rejected the
value of the Vedas and created independent textual traditions based on the words
and examples of their early teachers, eventually evolving entirely new ways for
interacting with the lay community.
Jainism
The oldest continuous monastic tradition in India is Jainism, the path of the
Jinas, or victors. This tradition is traced to Var-dhamana Mahavira (The Great
Hero; ca. 599-527 B.C.), the twenty-fourth and last of the Tirthankaras
(Sanskrit for fordmakers). According to legend, Mahavira was born to a ruling
family in the town of Vaishali, located in the modern state of Bihar. At the age
of thirty, he renounced his wealthy life and devoted himself to fasting and
self-mortification in order to purify his consciousness and discover the meaning
of existence. He never again dwelt in a house, owned property, or wore clothing
of any sort. Following the example of the teacher Parshvanatha (ninth century
B.C.), he attained enlightenment and spent the rest of his life meditating and
teaching a dedicated group of disciples who formed a monastic order following
rules he laid down. His life's work complete, he entered a final fast and
deliberately died of starvation.
The ancient belief system of the Jains rests on a concrete understanding of
the working of karma, its effects on the living soul (jiva ), and the
conditions for extinguishing action and the soul's release. According to the
Jain view, the soul is a living substance that combines with various kinds of
nonliving matter and through action accumulates particles of matter that adhere
to it and determine its fate. Most of the matter perceptible to human senses,
including all animals and plants, is attached in various degrees to living souls
and is in this sense alive. Any action has consequences that necessarily follow
the embodied soul, but the worst accumulations of matter come from violence
against other living beings. The ultimate Jain discipline, therefore, rests on
complete inactivity and absolute nonviolence (ahimsa) against any living beings.
Some Jain monks and nuns wear face masks to avoid accidently inhaling small
organisms, and all practicing believers try to remain vegetarians. Extreme
renunciation, including the refusal of all food, lies at the heart of a
discipline that purges the mind and body of all desires and actions and, in the
process, burns off the consequences of actions performed in the past. In this
sense, Jain renunciants may recognize or revere deities, but they do not view
the Vedas as sacred texts and instead concentrate on the atheistic, individual
quest for purification and removal of karma. The final goal is the extinguishing
of self, a "blowing out" (nirvana) of the individual self.
By the first century A.D., the Jain community evolved into two main divisions
based on monastic discipline: the Digambara or "sky-clad" monks who wear no
clothes, own nothing, and collect donated food in their hands; and the
Svetambara or "white-clad" monks and nuns who wear white robes and carry bowls
for donated food. The Digambara do not accept the possibility of women achieving
liberation, while the Svetambara do. Western and southern India have been Jain
strongholds for many centuries; laypersons have typically formed minority
communities concentrated primarily in urban areas and in mercantile occupations.
In the mid-1990s, there were about 7 million Jains, the majority of whom live in
the states of Maharashtra (mostly the city of Bombay, or Mumbai in Marathi),
Rajasthan, and Gujarat (see Structure and Dynamics, ch. 2). Karnataka,
traditionally a stronghold of Digambaras, has a sizable Jain community.
The Jain laity engage in a number of ritual activities that resemble those of
the Hindus around them (see The Ceremonies of Hinduism, this ch.). Special
shrines in residences or in public temples include images of the Tirthankaras,
who are not worshiped but remembered and revered; other shrines house the gods
who are more properly invoked to intercede with worldly problems. Daily rituals
may include meditation and bathing; bathing the images; offering food, flowers,
and lighted lamps for the images; and reciting mantras in Ardhamagadhi, an
ancient language of northeast India related to Sanskrit. Many Jain laity engage
in sacramental ceremonies during life-cycle rituals, such as the first taking of
solid food, marriage, and death, resembling those enacted by Hindus. Jains may
also worship local gods and participate in local Hindu or Muslim celebrations
without compromising their fundamental devotion to the path of the Jinas. The
most important festivals of Jainism celebrate the five major events in the life
of Mahavira: conception, birth, renunciation, enlightenment, and final release
at death.
At a number of pilgrimage sites associated with great teachers of Jainism,
the gifts of wealthy donors made possible the building of architectural wonders.
Shatrunjaya Hills (Siddhagiri) in Gujarat is a major Svetambara site, an entire
city of about 3,500 temples. Mount Abu in Rajasthan, with one Digambara and five
Svetambara temples, is the site of some of India's greatest architecture, dating
from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries A.D. In Karnataka, on the hill of
Sravana Belgola, stands the monolithic seventeen-meter-high statue of the naked
Bhagwan Bahubali (Gomateshvara), the first person in the world believed by the
faithful to have attained enlightenment, so deep in meditation that vines are
growing around his legs. At this site every twelve years, a major concourse of
Jain ascetics and laity participate in a purification ceremony in which the
statue is anointed from head to toe. Carved in 981, the statue is considered the
holiest Jain shrine. In addition to its lavish patronage of shrines, the Jain
community, with its long scriptural tradition and wealth gained from trade, has
always been known for its philanthropy and especially for its support of
education and learning. Prestigious Jain schools are located in most major
cities. The largest concentrations of Jains are in Maharashtra (more than
965,000) and Rajasthan (nearly 563,000), with sizable numbers also in Gujarat
and Madhya Pradesh.
this content is derived in part or whole from the
U.S. Library of Congress Country Studies
