________________
272
Lord Mahavira on his behalf. The climax of the episode is Harikesha's explanation to the brahmans of the nature of the true, internal sacrifice of the Jain monk:
Austerity is my sacrificial fire, my life is the place where the fire is kindled. Mental and physical efforts are my ladle for the oblation and my body is the dung fuel for the fire, my actions my firewood. I offer up an oblation praised by the wise seers consisting of my restraint, effort and calm.
(Utts 12.44-5) Harikesha's innate purity has nothing to do with birth or ritual purity but comes about through his celibacy and steadfastness in Jain principles. The heat (tapas) of the sacrificial fire is insignificant compared to the heat generated by the austerity (tapas) which remoulds life and destiny. Spiritual authority is in this context vested not in the ritual technician but in that individual who performs the morally correct action, the Jain monk. Going Forth: The Institution of World Renunciation
If, as it came to be believed, freedom from action, initially taken as ritual performance and then extended to include social action, was the means of escaping from the continuity of rebirth, how was such an actionless state to be achieved? The answer was that the individual had to cast off the bonds of the householder's life, the world of the cooking and sacrificial fires, and enter the life of homelessness by becoming a renouncer, a wandering mendicant who could not grow, cook or buy his own food but instead subsisted on alms. The term shramana, 'striver', used of Manâvîra and other renouncers to distinguish them from the brahmans, points to the physical and speculative exertion which was necessarily entailed in a life devoted to the minimising of the performance of external action and an accompanying control of inner activity.
It may well be that this 'going forth' (praurajya) from home, an institution which was to be so productive for Indian religious life and thought, was given impetus by the changes which Indian society was undergoing from around the eighth century BCE and that the growth of communities of renouncers with their evolving doctrines and codes of conduct was a response to the breakdown of old social values in the face of aggressive new state formations
