________________
102
Lord Mahavira
preachings, I like them and am prepared to mould my life according to them. They are indeed so as you have explained them. They are true, correct and devoid of all doubts. I have only to take permission of my parents. After that I shall become the initiated disciple of you, the Venerable Lord and be a wandering monk instead of a house-holder.'
The Lord replied, "Do not interrupt it, if it please you, O Beloved of gods.' 5. Entering the order of Jaina Asceticism
Jamali returned home with his thoughts definitely crystallized to the renunciation of worldly ties as the world seemed to him essentially a vale of misery. He greeted his parents and said, “I heard the religious discourse from Lord Mahâvîra. I am moved by it. Hence, my dear mother and father. I feel depressed with the miseries of earthly life. I am afraid of birth, old age and death. Therefore, I desire, with your kind permission to renounce household life and enter the ascetic one being properly initiated by Lord Mahâvîra."15
No sooner had his mother heard these words, than she fainted. It was with great effort on the part of Jamali and her attendants that she regained consciousness. A long discussion then followed between Jamali and his parents. They tried in vain to persuade their beloved and only son to desist from adopting the course of a houseless monk. They reminded him of his extreme and vigorous youth, riches, beautiful wives and all the means of worldly enjoyments, which were ever at his command. But a firm resolution could not be altered. He told his parents the fleeting and transitory nature of earhtly goods. He explained to them his total abhorrence of worldly pleasures and their non-finality. His parents, then, tried to discourage Jamali from his resolve by the intolerable hardships and severe sufferings one has to meet in course of a mendicant's life. Even then, he was unmoved in his rocklike decision. He said that he was in search of undying bliss and wanted to escape from the never ending cycle of births and deaths with all their concomitant experiences. Hence the privations of an ascetic life would not dissuade him from following the path he had chosen. The parents realized that they
