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16
VARDHAMÂNA AND THE FOUNDATIONS
OF JAINISM*
- Padmanabh S. Jaini
It is August, 1955. On the holy mount of Kunthalagiri, in the state of Maharashtra in India, an old man called Sântisagara (Ocean of peace) is ritually fasting to death. He is the âcârya (spiritual leader) of the Digambara Jaina community; now, after thirty-five years as a mendicant, he is attaining his mortal end in the holy manner prescribed by the great saint Mahâvîra almost 2,500 years earlier. Sântisagara has owned nothing, not even a loincloth, since 1920. He has wandered on foot over the length and breadth of India, receiving food offerings but once a day, and then with only his bare hands for a bowl; he has spoken little during daylight hours and not at all after sunset. From August 14 until September 7 he takes only water; then, unable to drink without help, he ceases even that. At last, fully conscious and chanting the Jaina litany, he dies in the early morning of September 18. The holiness and propriety of his life and of the manner of his death are widely known and admired by Jainas throughout India. Who Are the Jainas?
The designation Jaina, applied to the approximately four million members of one of India's most ancient sramana or nonVaidic religious traditions,2 literally means "follower of a Jina." The Jinas are “spiritual victors,” human teachers said to have attained kevalajñâna (infinite knowledge) and to have preached the doctrine of mokså (salvation). Such figures are also called Tîrthankaras (Builders of the ford (which leads across the ocean of suffering]). It is believed that twenty-four of them appear in
• The Jaina Path of Purification, Motilal Banarsidas, Publishers, Delhi-1990.
