Notes on Modern Jainism

Author(s): Mrs Sinclair Stevenson
Publisher: Oxford

Page 16

MODERN JAINISM.
as delightful to the mind;" and at last, when "the sky in all its directions [was] clear, bright and pure; while a favourable and agreeable low wind swept the earth; at the time when the fields were green and all people glad......... (Tris'ala,) perfectly healthy herself, gave birth to a perfectly healthy boy." +
#
His father had already decided what the boy's personal name should be: "From the moment that this our boy has been begotten, our silver increased, our gold increased,...the intensity of our liberality and popularity highly increased. Therefore when this our boy will be born, we shall give him the fit name, attributive and conformable to his quality-Vardhamana," (i. e' the increasing one.') #
Vardhamana, or (as he is called in the various Jaina scriptures) Mahavira, had discovered even before his birth how completely his mother's happiness was bound up in his, and he therefore came to the following decision: "It will not behove me, during the life of my parents, to tear out my hair, and leaving the house to enter the state of houselessness"; so, unlike Buddha, he lived the ordinary life of a nobleman until his parents' death. He married, and his wife, Yas'ōda, bore him a daughter, Anojjā (or Priyadars'ana), whose titled husband, Jamali, later on became one of his followers, and the connections thus formed were all to help him later in his life work. His parents eventually died, having kept all the rules of their religion; we are told in another of the Jaina sacred books, the A'caranga Sutra, that "they observed, blamed, repented, confessed and did penance according to their sins," and
S. B. E. xxii. 250. S. B. E. xxii. p. 249.
+ S. B. E. xxii. p. 251. § S. B. E. xxii. 250.