Nine Lives(4)

Crucially, the Jains differ from both Hindus and Buddhists in their understanding of karma, which for other faiths means simply the fruit of your actions. Jains, however, conceive of karma as a fine material substance that physically attaches itself to the soul, polluting and obscuring its potential for bliss by weighing it down with pride, anger, delusion and greed, and so preventing it from reaching its ultimate destination at the summit of the universe. To gain final liberation, you must live life in a way that stops you accumulating more karma, while wiping clean the karma you have accumulated in previous lives. The only way to do this is to embrace an ascetic life and to follow the path of meditation and rigorous self-denial taught by the Tirthankaras. You must embrace a life of world renunciation, non-attachment and an extreme form of non-violence.

The soul’s journey takes place in a universe conceived in a way that is different from that of any other faith. For Jains, the universe is shaped like a gigantic cosmic human body. Above the body is a canopy containing the liberated and perfected souls—siddhas—who, like the Tirthankaras, have escaped the cycle of rebirths. At the top of the body, level with the chest, is the celestial upper world, the blissful home of the gods.

At waist level is the middle world, where human beings live in a series of concentric rings of land and ocean. The central landmass of this world—the continent of the Rose Apple Tree—is bounded by the mighty Himalayas, and set within ramparts of diamonds. At its very centre, the axis mundi, lies the divine sanctuary of the Jinas, Mount Meru, with its two suns and two moons, its parks and woods and its groves of wish-granting trees. Adjacent to this, but slightly to the south, lies the continent of Bharata or India. Here can be found the great princely capitals, surrounded by ornamental lakes blooming with lotus flowers.

Below this disc lies the hell world of the Jains. Here souls who have committed great sins live as hell beings in a state of terrible heat, unquenchable thirst and endless pain, under the watch of a group of malignant and semi-divine jailers, the asuras, who are strongly opposed to the dharma of the Tirthankaras.

In this world, there are no creator gods: depending on its actions and karma, a soul can be reincarnated as a god, but eventually, when its store of merit is used up, the god must undergo the agonies of death and fall from heaven, to be reborn as a mortal in the middle world. The same is true of hell beings. Once they have paid through suffering for their bad actions, they can rise to be reborn in the middle world and again begin the cycle of death and rebirth—depending on their karma, as human beings, animals, plants or tiny unseen creatures of the air. Like the fallen gods, former hell beings can also aspire to achieving moksha, the final liberation of the soul from earthly existence and suffering. Even the Tirthankara Mahavira, the Great Hero himself, spent time as a hell being, and then as a lion, before rising to be a human and so finding the path to Enlightenment. It is only human beings—not the hedonistic gods—who can gain liberation, and the way to do this is completely to renounce the world and its passions, its desires and attachments, and to become a Jain ascetic. As such, the monk or nun must embrace the Three Jewels, namely right knowledge, right faith and right conduct, and to take five vows: no violence, no untruth, no stealing, no sex, no attachments. They wander the roads of India, avoiding any acts of violence, however small, and meditating on the great questions, thinking about the order and purpose of the universe, and attempting to ford the crossing places that lead through suffering to salvation. For the Jains, then, to be an ascetic is a higher calling than to be a god.

It is a strange, austere and in some ways very harsh religion; but that, explained Prasannamati Mataji, is exactly the point.



At ten o’clock each day, Prasannamati Mataji eats her one daily meal. On my third day in Sravanabelagola, I went to the math, or monastery, to watch what turned out to be as much a ritual as a breakfast.

Mataji, wrapped as ever in her unstitched white cotton sari, was sitting cross-legged on a low wooden stool which itself was raised on a wooden pallet in the middle of an empty ground-floor room. Behind her, her fan and coconut water pot rested against the wall. In front, five or six middle-class Jain laywomen in saris were fussing around with small buckets of rice, dal and masala chickpeas, eagerly attending on Mataji, whom they treated with extreme deference and respect. Mataji, however, sat with eyes lowered, not looking at them except glancingly, accepting without comment whatever she was offered. There was complete silence: no one spoke; any communication took place by hand signals, nods and pointed fingers.

As I approached the door, Mataji signalled with a single raised palm that I should remain where I was. One of the women explained that as I had not had a ritual bath, and had probably eaten meat, I must stay outside. Notebook in hand, I observed from the open door.