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THE DAILY LIFE OF JAINA SAINTS
263 be enumerated as follows: he practices three kinds of controls, bodily, vocal, and mental; he observes these in all the three possible forms, namely, krita (the actual commission of an act). karita (abetment), and anumodand (subsequent encouragement of the act); he controls all the four kinds of physical cravings or instincts, namely, hunger, fear, sex-passion, and the love of possession, which are allied to the five senses. In this way he refrains from injuring ten kinds of living beings namely, (1—4 four kinds of souls that have bodies of one element only, (5) vegetable-bodied or group souls, (6) one-sensed life, (7) twosensed life, (8) three-sensed life, (9) four-sensed life, and (10) five-sensed life), by practising the ten most excellent forms of dharma, forgiveness, humility and the like. We thus have— 3× 3 × 4× 5 × 10x 10-18,000.
These are the general virtues of saintly life; their subdivisions are as many as 8,400,000 from one standpoint of view, though probably beyond calculation in all their aspects.
These are practically all the rules that apply to a saint and control his conduct. The aryaka (nun) follows the same rules as far as practicable. The female saints are specially enjoined to keep together, under the order and leadership of some advanced nun. The aryaka does not visit the house of a layman alone or without purpose. She is allowed a single robe which is to cover her entire body, from head to foot. In all other respects she conducts herself as a saint of the opposite sex. The aryaka is not qualified, as such, to aspire for the pandita-pandita 'death,' but she expects to reach it, from a male body, in a subsequent incarnation. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that a female body is not like a male body in all respects, so that salvation is not possible for a female from the female form. Short of this, however, there is no other difference between the two, the male saint and the aryaka (nun), and the latter obtains heaven as the result of her asceticism, when, destroying the liability. to be re-born in the female form, she appears in the heavenly regions in the male body of a deva (a resident of the heavenly regions). In her subsequent re-birth amongst men she will retain the male sex, and will then
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
