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INTRODUCTION TO JAINISM
Well, the ability to read was not the most important thing. But one would no longer be able to check one's food for purity. There would be a time when a monk would refuse food for that reason. It is his karma, which he will not try to avoid. As an example she told me about something that had happened only a few weeks before. A monk had been bitten by a rabid dog outside the temple. The disease persevered, and the monk was offered treatment. But this he refused. He did not accept medicine, and his condition steadily worsened. Until he felt that the moment had arrived to take sallekhana – the vow of peaceful death. So from that moment on he refused all food. His body became weaker and weaker; but his mind became clearer and clearer. Subsequently he refused to drink as well. When he had lost all his energy and his awareness faded he moved his lips only once and for the last time and said: “Yes, now I know for sure that I have chosen the right way.” And he left his body.
Not everyone is so severe on himself. There was a very learned, somewhat older man who was wearing glasses and who was reading and studying almost continuously. His whole being radiated learnedness and culture. But, so I was told, while taking food he would take off his specs. It is a centuries old – indeed many millenniums old habit of monks and nuns to approach death in this peaceful way. When they feel that the vows they have taken can no longer be practiced, due to old age, disability, a sudden mishap, or an incurable disease, or if external circumstances make it impossible for them to maintain their religious vows, they enter into peaceful and blissful fasting until death, to “fight” off their karmas, because all such events arise only as effects of their own karma. Thus, when someone feels that his ayu-karma, i.e. the karma which determines the normal length of their earthly life, runs out, he or she chooses this path of sallekhana which leads to peaceful death, samadhi-maran. In hundreds, perhaps thousands of places in India two engraved feet can be seen in the hard bedrock, signifying a monk who has taken sallekhana at that spot. Some die while standing upright. On the rocks
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