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The Religious' Prāyascittas according to the Old Jaina Ritual
COLETTE CAILLAT
ALL the religious communities of India have exhorted their people to
"redeem” their offences, to "wash” their faults away so as to become "clean" and "purified".
Whether Brahmanic, Buddhist or Jaina, the teachers who have elaborated the various atonements have been exposed to the same historical factors, have lived, broadly speaking, in the same social context. It is no wonder, then, that most of the principles on which
1 This paper is a summary of the conclusions which were reached in
my book Les expiations dans le rituel ancien des religieux Jaina, Paris 1965, 239 pp. (Publications de l'Institut de Civilisation indienne, série in-8, fascicule 25). I cannot, in the present essay, show what I have tried to emphasize there, that the Jaina community was constantly humane, that the atonements have been conceived, first and foremost, to help the penitent in every respect. The works which will be the most frequently referred to are : Vav; Nis= Vavahāra- und Nisiha-sutta. Herausgegeben von Walther Schubring. Leipzig, 1918 (AKM XV1). The suttas are numbered in the present paper as in Drei Chedasūtras des Jaina-Kanons - Āyāradasão, Vavahāra, Nisīha - Bearbeitet von Walther Schubring. Mit einem Beitrag von Colette Caillat. Hamburg, 1966. Vyavahārasūtra, edited with the Bh (āsa) and Malayagiri's ? (ikā),
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