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190 Harmless Souls into the vows and life of an ascetic'.17 As the Āvaśyakaniryukti (c.90 C.E.?)18 remarks, during the time of sāmāyika, 'a layman becomes like an ascetic and for that reason it should be performed often'. 19
The extent to which this practice in its earliest form was fully meditational (i.e. aiming at self-realisation or gnosis through concentration), as opposed to simply a physical restraint, is not clear. P.S. Jaini does not address the problem, giving a largely synchronic analysis of sāmāyika based upon Williams' excellent study of the medieval śrāvakācāra material.20 It is reasonable to suppose that lay discipline in this respect would be meditational only to the extent that the corresponding ascetic discipline was also yogic. Yet there is also the possibility that sāmāyika, as the mental rehearsal or internalisation of ascetic practice, came to be instrumental in engendering a corresponding internalisation in the very ascetic behaviour it was attempting to concentrate. This process, if genuine, would have been facilitated by the fact that it was the same people who may have been practising in this way, as laity, who would eventually have become śramaņas. Neverthelss, it remains to be shown that the earliest practice of lay sāmāyika was anything more yogic than kāyotsarga, thought-free physical immobility.21
Sāmāyika-cāritra was not, of course, confined to lay practice. For Mahāvīra, as we have seen, it was the one all
17 Ibid. p. 226. 18 See Schubring 1962, para. 55. 19 R. Williams' paraphrase of: sāmāiyammi u kae samaņo iva sāvao havai jamhā / eeņa kāraṇenam bahuso sāmāiyam kujjā - quoted 1963, p. 133. 20 JPP pp. 221-227; cf. R. Williams 1963, pp. 131-139.
21 Eventually, sāmāyika comes to include pūjā, 'meditation by worship' and, indeed, is used as a blanket term for all types of spiritual activity. Moreover, according to the later classification of lay spiritual progress, it is the third pratimă (out of eleven), and the first of the four lay śikṣāvrata. For the relation of these vrata to each other and to mendicant practice, see JPP p. 182; see also ibid. p. 186-187, p. 190.
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