________________
CHAPTER VII SPIRITUAL EXERTIONS
The period of penances of Mahavira lasted for 12 years and 13 fortnights and that of the Buddha for six years. In the life of both these great man who marked their epoch with great achievements, we find hard penances, harder perseverance and still harder concentration. In the early part of his career as a monk, the Buddha like Mahavira, lived like an ordinary monk, and became lean and pale,and one day he fell down on an alter named Cankarmana. Then he realised that this sort of hard penance did not lead to enlightenment. So he again started taking food, and before he attained bodhi, he had taken khir served by Sujātā. He accepted that it was meditation that led to enlightenment. In reviewing through the stages of his penance, it should appear that he considered them as unpalable as a farmer wrongly attributes germination to a shower that comes after germination. The farmer fails to realise that not this shower alone, but the entire process like digging the earth, sowing seed, rainfall, all these taken together help in the germination.
Mahavira used cloth for slightly more than a year (after initiation), and thereafter he moved about without any cloth (1). The Buddha put on saffron robe at the time of his initiation (2).
There is much similarity between the two in their spiritual exertions. Mahāvira lived on dried rice, manthu and udad and the Buddha lived on sesamum, rice, etc. When for the first time, the Buddha took these coarse things, he felt a severe reaction in within his body, but he checked himself and ate. In both the traditions, we get a very exhaust account of the coarse food-stuff obtained from begging.
Regarding Mahāvira, we have the following from a discourse between Monk Ardraka and Gosālaka:
