Nine Lives(3)

“At every stage you are asked: are you prepared to go on, are you sure you are ready for this, are you sure you don’t want to turn back? It is very difficult to describe, but really it can be so beautiful: the ultimate rejection of all desires, the sacrificing of everything. You are surrounded, cradled, by your fellow monks. Your mind is fixed on the example of the Jinas.”

She smiled. “You have to understand that for us death is full of excitement. You embrace sallekhana not out of despair with your old life, but to gain and attain something new. It’s just as exciting as visiting a new landscape or a new country: we feel excited at a new life, full of possibilities.”

I must have looked surprised, or unconvinced, because she stopped and explained what she meant using the simplest images. “When your clothes get old and torn,” she said, “you get new ones. So it is with the body. After the age of thirty, every year it becomes weaker. When the body withers completely, the soul will take a new one, like a hermit crab finding a new shell. For the soul will not wither, and in rebirth you simply exchange your torn and damaged old clothes for a smart new suit.”

“But you could hardly have felt excited when your friend left you like this.”

“No,” she said, her face falling. “It is hard for those who are left.”

She stopped. For a moment Mataji lost her composure; but she checked herself.

“After Prayogamati died, I could not bear it. I wept, even though we are not supposed to. Any sort of emotion is considered a hindrance to the attainment of Enlightenment. We are meant to cultivate indifference—but still I remember her.”

Again her voice faltered. She slowly shook her head. “The attachment is there even now,” she said. “I can’t help it. We lived together for twenty years. How can I forget?”



Jainism is one of the most ancient religions of the world, similar to Buddhism in many respects, and emerging from the same heterodox classical Indian world of the Ganges basin in the early centuries BC. Like Buddhism, it was a partly a reaction to Brahminical caste consciousness and the readiness of the Brahmins to slaughter huge quantities of animals for temple sacrifices—but the faith of the Jains is slightly more ancient, and much more demanding than Buddhist practice. Buddhist ascetics shave their heads; Jains pluck their hair out by the roots. Buddhist monks beg for food; Jains have to have their food given to them without asking. All they can do is to go out on gowkari—the word used to describe the grazing of a cow—and signal their hunger by curving their right arm over their shoulder. If no food comes before the onset of the night, they go to bed hungry. They are forbidden to accept or in any way handle money.

In ancient India, the Jain monks were also celebrated for their refusal to wash, and like the Coptic monks of Egypt, equated a lack of concern for outward appearance with inner purity. One early inscription at Sravanabelagola admiringly refers to a monk so begrimed with filth that “he looked as if he wore a closely fitting suit of black armour.” Today the monks are allowed to wipe themselves with a wet towel and to wash their robes every few weeks; but bathing in ponds or running water or the sea is still strictly forbidden, as is the use of soap.

Unlike Buddhism, the Jain religion never spread beyond India, and while it was once a popular and powerful faith across the subcontinent, patronised by the princes of a succession of Deccani dynasties, today there are only four million Jains left, and these are largely limited to the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Outside India, the religion barely exists, and in contrast to Buddhism, is almost unknown in the West.

The word Jain derives from Jina, meaning liberator or spiritual conqueror. The Jinas or Tirthankaras—ford-makers—were a series of twenty-four human teachers who each discovered how to escape the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Through their heroic tapasya—bodily austerities—they gained omniscient and transcendent knowledge which revealed to them the nature of the reality of the great theatre of the universe, in every dimension. The most recent of those, according to the Jains, was the historical figure of Mahavira (599–529 BC)–the Great Hero—a prince of Magadha, in modern Bihar, who renounced the world at the age of thirty to become a wandering thinker and ascetic.

Mahavira elaborated to his followers a complex cosmological system that the Jains still expound 2,600 years later. Like followers of other Indian faiths they believe in an immortal and indestructible soul, or jivan, and that the sum of one’s actions determines the nature of one’s future rebirth. However, the Jains diverge from Hindus and Buddhists in many ways. They reject the Hindu idea that the world was created or destroyed by omnipotent gods, and they mock the pretensions of the Brahmins, who believe that ritual purity and temple sacrifices can bring salvation. As a Jain monk explains to a group of hostile Brahmins in one of the most ancient Jain scriptures, the most important sacrifice for Jains is not some puja, or ritual, but the sacrifice of one’s own body: “Austerity is my sacrifical fire,” says the monk, “and my life is the place where the fire is kindled. Mental and physical effort are my ladle for the oblation, and my body is the dung fuel for the fire, my actions my firewood. I offer up an oblation praised by the wise seers consisting of my restraint, effort and calm.”