71_jainism.md

Introduction to Jainism (Jeffrey Long)

1. Why bad things happen to good people? "All religions must address the issue of why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. Why, if there is universal justice—which is essentially what karma amounts to—does the world in which we live appear to be as unjust as it does? Indic religions explain this phenomenon in terms of past and future lives. Today’s joy or suffering may be the fruit of karma from a previous life. And the actions one takes today will inevitably bear fruit—if not in this life, then in a future one."

2. The principle of karma allows you to not have 'divine judge' "Like Buddhists, and unlike most Hindus, Jains do not affirm the idea of a God—at least as this idea is understood in the Abrahamic religions: a creator and moral arbiter of the universe. Karmic “reward” and “punishment” is a wholly impersonal process, and we are each responsible for our own joy and suffering. There is no divine judge."

3. No real founder But this figure is a “founder” only in a limited sense, for according to Jainism he is not so much the founder of a tradition as a rediscoverer and re-initiator of eternal truths and an eternal path that have been rediscovered and re-initiated again and again throughout beginningless time.

4. Same time as Buddha and similar sort of area Mahāvīra, the “Great Hero,” lived at about the same time and in the same region as the Buddha: approximately 2,500 years ago in the northeastern region of India that recent scholarship has designated “Greater Magadha.”

5. Walking as the only approved mode of transportation. "In the name of avoiding even accidental injury to small life forms, the only acceptable mode of transportation for Jain monks and nuns has been walking."

6. Digambar Nuns. "Digambara nuns do wear clothing, but are regarded, for that very reason, as incapable of practicing non-attachment to the degree of which a man is capable. Digambara Jains therefore traditionally believe that only men can attain mokṣa. A woman must await rebirth as a man in order to aspire to this goal. From a Digambara point of view, Digambara nuns and Śvetāmbara ascetics of both genders are nothing more or less than pious laypersons. Śvetāmbara monks are not true monks, from a Digambara perspective, due to their attachment to the wearing of clothing. ... Rebirth as a woman is therefore an unfortunate state, since it prevents one from engaging in monastic practice to the degree necessary for attaining liberation—from the practice of monastic nudity." ... Svetambars seem women as equally capable to attaining moksha.

7. Jain sects:

   • "It is not clear precisely when or how these two groups separated, but the schism occurred sometime before the second century of the Common Era and may have been a gradual process. Until the fifteenth century, there was also an “intermediate” group called the Yāpanīyas, who practiced monastic nudity much as the Digambaras do, but they wore a simple white cloth when in public."

   • Digambars mostly live in Maharashtra/Karnataka.

   • The Śvetāmbaras are further subdivided into three main groups. More than half are Mūrtipūjakas, who, as their name suggests, engage in pūjā, or worship, using images, or mūrtis. The other two, more recently formed Śvetāmbara groups, are the Sthānakavāsīs and Terāpanthīs. They differ from both Digambara Jains and Mūrtipūjaka Śvetāmbaras regarding the propriety of mūrtipūjā, which they do not engage in.

   The Sthānakavāsīs and Terāpanthīs were inspired, but not technically established, by Loṅkā Śāh, a fifteenth-century Jain reformer who held that the monastic practices of his time did not live up to the vision of the Jain scriptures, particularly with regard to the observance of ahiṃsā. Loṅkā regarded mūrtipūjā as a violation of ahiṃsā, because of the destruction of small organisms involved in temple building and in the ritual of pūjā itself.

8. History

   • Pārśvanātha is said to have taught a path of asceticism and self-restraint consisting of adherence to four basic moral rules: nonviolence (ahiṃsā), truthfulness (satya), non-stealing (asteya), and non-accumulation of possessions (aparigraha).
   • Another parallel between the two textual traditions (Buddhist and Jain) is that neither is written in the common language of intellectual activity in ancient India—namely, Sanskrit—but in more localized languages, related to Sanskrit, called Prakrits. The Jain scriptures were written in a Prakrit called Ardha-Māgadhī, while the Buddhist scriptures were written in Pāli.
     • One way to think about it is as a deliberate choice against Brahmins but: "Recent scholarship, however, suggests that the Prakrits in which the Buddhist and Jain scriptures were written were not the languages spoken by the Buddha and Mahāvīra, respectively, but were themselves highly technical and specialized languages that served for the Buddhists and the Jains the same purpose that Sanskrit served for the Brahmins—as an “in-group” code, typically learned only by initiates." Buddhists and Jains also started using Sanskrit later.
   • The śramaṇa (śramaṇa / samaṇa) movement was a broad wave of renouncer/ascetic “seeker” traditions that took off in northern India around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, running parallel to (and often in tension with) Brahmanical/Vedic religion.

9. Jain means “follower of the Jina”—the Conqueror.

10. One finds a number of śramaṇic themes in the later Vedic literature—a set of texts called the Upaniṣads—including a critique of the orthodox Brahmanical idea of birth caste as a measure of spiritual evolution. But one finds indications of a Brahmanical–Kṣatriya ideological struggle in these texts as well. Indeed, the Upaniṣads appear surprisingly sympathetic to the Kṣatriya side of this hypothetical ideological conflict, given that these are Vedic texts, and so central to Brahmanical orthodoxy.

11. In Jainism, Diwali marks the day Lord Mahavira attained Nirvana (liberation)

12. Philosophy of renunciation

    • "But the philosophy of renunciation that all of these traditions share is based on the insight that the highest good does not consist of making an endless effort toward bettering and maintaining the karmic situation of one’s soul. Is there no rest for the soul? Is there no higher aim to give life a purpose and a meaning? Is it not the case, given that we are limited beings, that even the most heroic good deeds will produce karmic effects that will eventually wear out, and that we will again have to continue doing good works in order to maintain our karmic state?

    The Buddhist tradition expresses this idea with its First Noble Truth: that existing in saṃsāra, experiencing karmic effects, inevitably involves dukkha, or suffering. This is an idea shared by Hindus and Jains as well. Dukkha does not mean that we are always unhappy. But it means that the highest happiness available to us through the karmically conditioned experiences of this life is limited and impermanent."

    • A passion is a kind of deformation in the structure of the soul, which is otherwise, as mentioned above, inherently omniscient and blissful. The passions arise in response to stimuli—to experiences.

      Experiences, in turn, are the effects of karmic matter previously embedded in the soul through the process of attraction by the passions. In other words, karmic bondage is a vicious circle. At any given point in the journey of the soul through saṃsāra—its wandering process of birth, death, and rebirth in the material world—it contains karmic particles that it has attracted through its passionate responses to prior stimuli. As these particles produce their effects, in the form of various experiences, more passions are elicited and more particles are attracted, which will lead to more experiences, and so on. Until the soul has purified itself of karmic matter, giving rise to pure knowledge (kevalajñāna) and pure bliss, the process will continue.

    • In the terms we have been using, it is not the case that karma determines the type of passion that will arise in response to the experience that it produces. We are in control, ultimately, of how we respond to stimuli. It is this element of freedom that makes a path of liberation from karma possible, for this freedom opens up a space for human action that can shape the future of one’s relationship to the karmic process.

13. Ahiṃsā is the absence of even a desire to do harm to any living being, in thought, word, or deed.

14. In Western religions, there is typically one good that is to be achieved—salvation—and that good is an all-or-nothing prospect: one is either saved and goes to heaven or is damned for all eternity. And there is only one lifetime in which the matter can be decided. In the Indic traditions, however, there is a hierarchy of goods that are not mutually incompatible.

15. Monks and nuns take stricter versions of the same five vows, called, in their case, the five mahāvratas, or “great vows”:

    Strict nonviolence in thought, word, and deed, avoiding even accidental injury to any living being.
    
    Absolute truthfulness.
    
    Non-stealing (literally, “not taking what is not given”).
    
    Absolute celibacy.
    
    Non-possession: not owning any possessions whatsoever.
    

16. Anger, force, harsh words (even if they are true), deceit, accumulation, negligence, and so on are all different forms of hiṃsā.

17. Jain devotion is seen, at least by ascetics, more as a form of meditation on the ideal that the deity—typically one of the Jinas—embodies.

18. Relativity

    • The first of these doctrines, anekāntavāda, claims that reality is complex, or anekānta (literally, “non-one-sided”).

    The second doctrine, nayavāda, the “doctrine of perspectives,” is an epistemic corollary of the first—a claim about the nature of knowledge in the complex universe that anekāntavāda posits. Given the complex nature of reality, anything may be known from a variety of nayas, or perspectives, that correspond to its many aspects.

    This implies, finally, the third doctrine, syādvāda, or the doctrine of conditional predication (literally, the “maybe doctrine”), according to which the truth of any claim that one makes about a particular topic is dependent upon the perspective, or naya, from which that claim is made. A claim can be true in one sense or from one perspective (the technical meaning of the Sanskrit verb syāt in a Jain philosophical context), false from another perspective, both true and false from another, have an inexpressible truth-value from yet another, and so on.

    • That these Jain doctrines of relativity do not constitute a form of what is called, in contemporary Western thought, relativism—the view either that there is no truth or that “truth” is solely a matter of convention—is evidenced, again, by this story. There really is an elephant there, and it really does have particular characteristics, and not others.

Misc.

1. Keśa-locana: “hair removal by plucking”... A ritual where monks/nuns pull out hair by the roots (instead of cutting/shaving it). It’s especially associated with initiation (dīkṣā) and, in some traditions, repeated periodically as part of ascetic discipline.

2. Santhārā / Sallekhanā: the vow of fasting at life’s end. A formal religious vow of gradually reducing food (and sometimes water) in a supervised, deliberate way near the end of life, aiming to die in calmness and detachment. In Jain texts and practice it’s presented as “thinning out” passions (and the body) rather than a dramatic act of self-destruction.

3. “five nectars” (pañcāmrta), which can consist of either (1) coconut juice, (2) sugarcane juice, (3) milk, (4) yellow sandalwood water, and (5) red sandalwood water, or, alternatively, (1) milk, (2) yogurt, (3) water, (4) yellow sandalwood water, and (5) red sandalwood water.

4. Makkhali Gosāla was the leader of the one other śramaṇa sect, besides the Jains and the Buddhists, about which there is any extensive surviving information. This sect, called the Ājīvikas, existed until the medieval period... Gosāla is attributed by both Jains and Buddhists with a teaching that might help explain the aversion shown to this śramaṇa in both scriptural traditions. He supposedly taught “that fate or destiny (niyati) was the central motive force in the universe against which no human effort could have any effect.” ... A very ancient text, the Sayings of the Seers (Isibhāsiyāim), which includes teachings attributed to a number of ancient Indian sages—Jain, Buddhist, and Brahmanical—suggests that Gosāla did not teach fatalism, but rather advocated “the virtue of imperturbability in the face of the continued change and modification which were seen to be in the world.”

Johannes Bronkhorst has argued that the depiction of Ājīvika doctrine as fatalism is, in fact, a misrepresentation in the form of a half-truth. His claim is that, whereas the Jains teach that one can both stop the influx of new karma and rid oneself of old karma through ascetic practice, Gosāla taught that one could only stop the influx of new karma. The karma one has already accumulated is already fixed and must run its course.

5. If caste-related practices of recent times are any indication of ancient practices, this has been a remarkably fluid and variable system—more of a “process” than a “system.” M. N. Srinivas coined the term sanskritization for this process, which involves upward social mobility accomplished by the adoption, by lower-caste groups, of Brahmanical ritual practices. Given the phenomenon of sanskritization, it is likely that groups regarded at one point in time as high caste were, at an earlier point, low caste, achieving their current status by adopting specific Brahmanical practices.

6. Caste

   • From Portugese casta for color

   • Color may mean 'gunas' with warrior as red, etc.

   • That such a system was questioned by some members of the society is clear from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, a part of the late Vedic corpus, where a story is found in which a young man of indeterminate caste approaches a renowned Brahmin for Vedic instruction, a privilege reserved exclusively for Brahmins. When the young man is truthful regarding his lineage, the Brahmin accepts him as a student, exclaiming: “Who but a Brahmin could speak like that!”

   • Buddha is attributed with saying: “One is not a Brahmin by birth, nor by birth a non-Brahmin. By action is one a Brahmin; by action is one a non-Brahmin.”

7. Darshan

   • The main division in the traditional Indian categorization system is between those darśanas, or philosophical systems, which accept the authority of the Veda and those that do not. The former set of systems is also called āstika, or orthodox, while the latter are called nāstika.
   • The nāstika systems are generally listed as three: Jaina (or Jain), Bauddha (Buddhist), and the Cārvāka or Lokāyata system.
   • The three pairs of āstika, or Vedic, darśanas are the Sāṃkhya and Yoga systems, the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika systems, and the Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta systems.

   The Sāṃkhya and Yoga systems are only nominally Vedic. The Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika systems do mention the Veda explicitly and argue for its validity. Interestingly, however, they do not typically invoke its authority in order to justify their claims, relying instead on tarka, or logic.

   Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta are truly Vedic, taking as their primary goal the interpretation of Vedic texts, and taking the truth of these texts as axiomatic. The Mīmāṃsakas, as they were called, developed an elaborate philosophy of language on the basis of their belief in the power of the Sanskrit verses of the Veda—if recited in the correct way and in the correct ritual context—to have actual effects in the world, such as bringing about long life, prosperity, success in battle, and so forth. Mimasas close to Charvak as goal is worldly success and going to svarga.

   The Vedāntins, on the other hand, were chiefly preoccupied with the later portion of the Veda, the Upaniṣads, and the pursuit of mokṣa. Vedānta eventually became the dominant form of Hindu philosophy (or theology), which it remains today.