IB World Religions 1.9.1. Jainism in Context: Mahavira and the Jain Community Notes

1.9.1. Jainism in Context: Mahavira and the Jain Community

Mahavira and the tirthankaras

1. Jains call their great teachers tirthankaras, ford-makers, and count twenty-four in the present age of the world. Mahavira is the twenty-fourth and last, so Jains understand him as reviving a teaching older than himself rather than inventing it.
2. Vardhamana, later titled Mahavira, meaning great hero, was born into a ruling family in what is now Bihar in north India. Traditional Jain dating places his life from 599 to 527 BCE, though many historians argue for a later period.
3. Jains hold that he left his household at about thirty and spent over twelve years as a wandering ascetic, fasting, keeping silence and refusing to harm any living thing. The tradition teaches that this ended in kevala jnana, complete and unobstructed knowledge, after which he taught for thirty years and died at Pavapuri aged seventy-two.
4. Jains remember the twenty-third tirthankara, Parshvanatha, as a teacher of the ninth or eighth century BCE, and many historians accept that a Parshva tradition ran before Mahavira. The first of the twenty-four, Rishabhanatha, is placed at the start of the present cycle of time, far outside historical memory.
5. Jains do not treat the tirthankaras as gods or saviours. They are held to be liberated souls who no longer act in the world, so honouring them means taking their example rather than asking their help.

Jinas and the shramana world

1. The word Jain comes from jina, conqueror, and a jina is one who has conquered the passions and the karma they attract. Jains are the followers of the conquerors.
2. Jainism took shape within the shramana movement, a family of Indian renouncer traditions that also produced early Buddhism and grew up in tension with the Vedic religion of the brahmins.
3. Like other shramana traditions, Jains rejected animal sacrifice and denied that the Vedas carry authority. They held that liberation is reached by a person's own effort, not by ritual performed on that person's behalf.
4. Jains teach that the universe has no creator and no ruling God. What other traditions assign to a creator, Jain thought assigns to eternal substances and the automatic working of karma.
5. Gods do appear in the Jain account, but they are souls reborn in heavenly bodies whose merit will run out. Jains treat them as fellow travellers inside the cycle, not as a source of rescue from it.
6. Jain teachers also developed anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness, which holds reality is too complex for one viewpoint to capture whole. Jains link it to non-violence, since refusing to insist your own view is the entire truth is itself a restraint.

The fourfold community

1. Mahavira is credited with organizing his followers into a fourfold order, the chaturvidha sangha: monks (sadhus), nuns (sadhvis), laymen (shravakas) and laywomen (shravikas).
2. Jain mendicants own almost nothing, travel on foot and beg already cooked food rather than storing or preparing any. They keep the five great vows in full, while lay Jains keep the same vows in a limited form fitted to family and working life, one path followed at two depths rather than two religions.
3. The two halves depend on each other daily. Lay families provide food and shelter for the rainy season, while mendicants provide teaching and a standard of conduct against which the laity measure themselves.
4. Women have belonged to the order since Mahavira's lifetime, and tradition names Chandanbala as the first nun. Among Svetambara Jains today the nuns considerably outnumber the monks, which is unusual in any religious order.
5. Occupation is a religious question. Because ploughing kills small creatures in the soil, Jain communities have historically avoided farming and concentrated in trade, banking, jewellery and the professions.

Digambara and Svetambara

1. Jains divide into two branches, the Digambara, sky-clad, and the Svetambara, white-clad. Jain accounts trace the split to a famine and migration in the centuries after Mahavira, and it was settled by roughly the first century CE.
2. The most visible difference is clothing. Senior Digambara monks wear nothing at all, treating any possession as a compromise of non-attachment; Svetambara monks and nuns wear plain white robes.
3. The branches disagree about whether a woman can be liberated from a female body. Digambaras hold that she must first be reborn as a man, since complete nudity is required and is not open to women, while Svetambaras hold that women can be liberated as women and identify the nineteenth tirthankara, Malli, as one.
4. They also disagree about scripture: Svetambaras preserve a canon of Agamas written at a council at Valabhi, while Digambaras hold the original teaching was lost. One text is accepted by both, the Tattvartha Sutra of Umasvati, a short summary of doctrine that has served for centuries as common ground.
5. The difference reaches into the temple. Digambara images are plain, unclothed and downward-looking, while Svetambara images are dressed and often given inlaid eyes and ornaments.
6. Each branch subdivides further. The Svetambara Sthanakvasi and Terapanth Jains reject image worship altogether, and their mendicants keep a small cloth over the mouth at all times.

Jains in the world today

1. Jains are a small community with influence out of proportion to their numbers. India's census counts around four and a half million, mostly in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Karnataka, with settled diaspora populations in Britain, North America and East Africa.
2. Temple practice is not petition. Jains bathe and honour the image of a tirthankara to turn their own minds toward the qualities it represents, since a liberated soul is held to be past hearing requests.
3. Pilgrimage carries the tradition's memory: Shatrunjaya at Palitana, Dilwara at Mount Abu, and Shravanabelagola, where a statue of Bahubali is anointed once every twelve years.
4. The Jain year turns on Paryushana for Svetambaras and Das Lakshana for Digambaras, eight and ten days of fasting, scripture and confession at the close of the monsoon. Jains also keep Diwali as the anniversary of Mahavira's liberation, so a festival of lights shared with Hindu neighbours carries a Jain meaning of its own.
5. The final day of Paryushana asks Jains to seek forgiveness from everyone they may have harmed, face to face and now by message too, with the phrase micchami dukkadam, may my wrongdoing come to nothing.