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INTRODUCTION TO JAINISM
for her and gave her hints for her research – they have known each other for decades, and, whenever possible, where he goes, she goes. She regards it as her scientific task and ancestral duty and is prepared to postpone her own salvation a few lifetimes for this. What merit is greater than abandoning even that most spiritual of all egoisms: the subtle desire to reach the liberation of your soul for the benefit of yourself alone?
The deepest motivation for leading a monk's life is to reach omniscience, salvation and nirvāna, leaving all mundane matters and false desires behind. An eternal, immortal, spiritual life is in store. From a man one becomes a god. Therefore one bends one's spiritual thinking and acting always towards universal love, nonviolence and purity and the acquisition of a perfect unlimited clarity of mind to avoid illusion. For this purpose one gives up or avoids yielding to any impulse from the evanescent: physical as well as psychic and mental desires. They can stand pain, hunger, thirst and discomfort thanks to their deep belief that they are not identified by their body, but that they are their soul, which only needs to do away with the physical body and all other karmic bondages to free itself. Because of their absolute separation of spirit and matter they can abhor the body while glorifying the soul. Still they do not inflict any harm on their bodies, and there is no self-torture in Jainism: that would be an act of violence against the billions of living beings of which the body is composed.
I asked the youngest of the monks whether it did not frustrate him that he would have to wait so long before reincarnating in a period when there would be an embodied Tīrthamkara on earth to instruct him directly - tens of thousands of years in the future. But he had a cheerful answer to that: after his death in his present incarnation he would be born and live as a celestial being for a long period of time (by earthly standards) in a body of a more subtle type of matter than our physical senses can perceive, but that nevertheless is as real as the body we are used to at present. In this condition
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