Jain Spirit 2003 12 No 17

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 48

WORSHIP
relationship with the misguided Kamath, to his final liberation at Sammet Shikhar. Second, it does this in a way that ties this personal history firmly to the timelessness of the kalyanaks.
As actually performed, Parsvanath's Panch Kalyanak Pooja expresses these ideas by utilising the five kalyanaks as a series of five kinetic high points as the participants sing their way through the rite's narrative. Unlike the Snatra Pooja, the performance does not involve any actual enactment of the events the text describes. Most participants merely sing the text. They should do so, of course, with maximum devotional spirit. At the five points in the text at which one of the kalyanaks occurs, a gong is sounded, and then a smaller number of participants anoint the Tirthankara's image and makes a series of offerings to it. Each of these five sub-rites culminate in the offering of a coconut, which represents the auspicious result (the 'fruit') of the Tirthankara's earthly career and also the hoped-for fruit of the rite commemorating that career.
However, the Tirthankara's advent and career are merely the setting for Jain teachings, which are the true heart of the matter. These teachings also find ritual expression, most significantly, in the rite known as the Ashtaprakari Pooja, the eightfold worship, the most quotidian of all major Jain ceremonials. It consists of a series of actions and recitations, which may occur mentally, in eight parts and are performed by an individual in the presence of a Tirthankara's image. There exists no standard text for reciting with the rite, but each of its parts has a well-understood symbolism. The rite is, one might say, its own text.
One of the clearest explanations known to me of the symbolism of this rite is found in Muni Muktiprabhvijay's small book entitled (in its Hindi version) Shravak ko Kya Karna Chahiye. He shows how the rite can be seen as a summary of the Jain ethos and worldview. The rite's final three steps warrant special attention. The first of these, the sixth step of the overall rite, is known as Akshat pooja. The worshiper makes a special diagram with grains of unbroken and non-viable rice. It consists of a svastik (the arms of which represent the four great classes of living things), over which are three dots (symbolising knowledge, insight and right conduct), surmounted by a bowllike crescent with a dot between its upright arms (symbolising the abode of liberated souls at the apex of the cosmos). The next step, the seventh, is Naivedya pooja. It consists of a food offering (usually sweets) that carries an extraordinary significance. Muni Muktiprabhvijay explains that the offerer, who is ahari (one who eats), makes the offering in the hope that he or she can become like the Tirthankara, who is anahari (one who does not eat, one who is liberated). Thus, in ritual symbolism the offering is a form of fasting. In the final and eighth part of the rite, known as Phal pooja, worship with fruit, a fruit is placed on top of the crescent and dot at the top of the diagram. This, of course, symbolises liberation as the ultimate fruit of the rite and of Jain teachings more generally.
We thus see that the closing phases of the Ashtaprakari Pooja can be read as a worshiper's enactment of some of
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Jain Spirit December 2003 February 2004
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Rituals Are Pregnant With Meaning
Jainism's core ideas and deepest values. In the svastik, we see the endless flux of samsara, which is the context of the soul's bondage. The three dots above it are means of liberation, and the fruit represents the central strategy the tradition offers for the attainment of liberation, which is renunciation (tyaga). The offering of food is a symbolic giving up of food in emulation of the Tirthankara. The giving up of food, in turn, is both a strategy of individual self-purification and a trope for the shedding of the bodily prison of the soul, for eating is the sine qua non of the soul's worldly bondage. This provides a fitting point of transition to the more purely spiritualised mental worship (bhav puja) to which the worshiper should turn at this point.
The Ashtaprakari Pooja completes the circle. Here, we find Jainism's most cherished and central truths externalised in action. This externalisation, however, is but the outer surface of feelings and commitment that should be deeply rooted in one's innermost life. It is not simply that rituals reinforce belief, for belief needs non-reinforcement for many participants. These rites represent, rather, an alternative mode of expression that enriches and deepens belief by making it available to the senses as well as the mind's eye.
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Lawrence Babb is Professor of Anthropology and Willem Schupf Professor of Asian Languages and Civilisations at Amherst College, USA. The above article is from the Souvenir of the Twelfth Biennial JAINA Convention, Cincinnati, Ohio - July 3-6, 2003.
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