Bhagvana Mahavira

Author(s): Tulsi Acharya
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

Page 22

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Bhagavān Mahāvira
The king amply rewarded the sooth-sayers and applied himself to his routine duties.
The Resolution in the Womb
There are things in the world which we cannot easily believe in. We are accustomed to believe in those things only which we have seen with our own eyes. It is common knowledge that the mind of a child grows with the growth of his sense-organs and the brain. Knowledge is not innate in the mind of a child. The reader will be surprised if he were told that the son of Trišalā commanded extra-sensory perception while he was still in the womb of his mother. Experience tells us that a child in the womb is not even capable of having sensory knowledge, not to a speak of supersensory knowledge. Miraculous events create all kinds of doubts.
The child which Trisalā had conceived had been born in his previous lives as an ascetic called Nandan. He had performed long tapas (penances). He would remain absorbed in meditation for a whole month without eating anything. At the end of the month be would take meals for a single day only and then again begin another month-long meditation. These tapas and meditations lasted for years and years together in a series. Service and meditation were blended together in the saint's life. Subtle powers had come to acquire perfect control over gross ones. By removing the effects of karma enveloping his consciousness he had permanently developed the capacity for pratyakşa or direct perception, avadhi jñāna which may be called as clairvoyance.
While it was still in the womb, the child, out of compassion for its mother, decided not to move and stir in the womb. Why should it cause pain to its mother or to any. body else, it thought. Its soul had been soaked in ahiṁsā from time immemorial. It had been immersed in compassion. Moved by these it stopped stirring in the mother's womb like a yogi lost in meditation.