Facets of Jaina Religiousness in Comparative Light

Author(s): L M Joshi
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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JAINA CONCEPTION OF THE HOLY PENTAD
they have loosened internal as well as external knots or ties; they seek eradication of karmas by means of austerities and penances.112 One text teaches that the service (sevā) of sadhus results in the destruction of transmigration, in the attainment of tranquillity, and in the increase of knowledge and intelligence; it also results in the increase of one's glory and religious merits. Another text states that the happiness which the sådhus enjoy in this world as a result of renouncing worldly concerns is not accessible to the king of kings nor to the king of gods.114 Having given up thoughts of the world, a sadhu constantly dwells on the thought of the knowledge of the self, having conquered anger, avarice and sensuality, a sädhu lives in happiness free from the fever of passions. Such, in brief, is the image of a member of the sadhu class. III. viii. COMPARATIVE NOTES
It is noteworthy that the institutions of acarya, upadhyaya, and sadhu are not peculiar to Jainism; they are well known also in Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions. What is peculiar to Jainism is the doctrine of the holy pentad (pañcaparameşthin) in which spiritual guides, scriptural instructors, and mendicant monks have been accorded an extraordinary position of holiness and religious authority. The holy pentad is known as pañcaparameşthin. One Jaina text declares that "a paramesthin is one who is established in the Supreme Station" (paramapade tişthati iti parameşthi),114
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It is obvious that the parameşthins are not individual persons but certain ethical and spiritual qualities idealized and personified. Obeisance is offered not to a person but to the holiness symbolized and exemplified by that person. The sadhus constituting the third refuge are thus a mass of ethical excellence and intellectual attainments. The individual sådhus are subject to birth, aging, disease and death; they cannot be the refuge of beings tormented by sufferings of the existence in samsara. It is the manifestation of the sacred in sadhus which makes them extraordinary. It is this act of manifestation, of showing and revealing something which is sacred or holy and entirely different from what is characteristic of our world, that constitutes the essential nature of sadhus venerated in the formula of obeisance.
The sadhus of the Jaina conception like the bhiksus of Buddhist tradition are all followers of what has rightly been called the "extraordinary norm";118 that is to say,
112. Pancadhyayi, II. 71; II. 672.
113. Vijayodayatika on Bhagavati Aradhana, p. 348.
114. Prasamaratiprakaraṇa, verse 128.
115. Ibid., verse 129.
116. Svayambhu-stotra-țīkā, quoted after Jainendra Siddhānta-koša, vol. III, p. 22.
117. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 11, uses the word "hierophany" for this pheno
menon.
118.
See Franklin Edgerton, "Dominant Ideas in the Formation of Indian Culture" in The Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 62, (1949).
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