Notes on Modern Jainism

Author(s): Mrs Sinclair Stevenson
Publisher: Oxford

Page 17

LIFE OF MAHA VIRA.
finally attained a meritorious death by suicide": "( reclining] on a bed of kus'a grass they rejected all food, and their bodies dried up by the last mortification of the flesh, which is to end in death." +
Mahāvira was now thirty, and with the permission of his elder brother, Nandivardhana, he resolved to enter upon the spiritual career which in India as in Europe has so often proved a fitting sphere for younger sons.
Dr. Hoernle I tells us that the Nāta clan kept up a monastic establishment for monks of Pārsvanātha's order in Kollāga, and it was naturally this establishment that Mahāvira first joined. But their rule did not seem to him stringent enough, and after a year and a month he separated from them on the question of wearing clothes, $ and “after that time walked about naked and accepted alms in the hollow of his hand." The question of wearing clothes or not was destined to become a crucial one in the history of Jainisin, for it was on this point that its two great sects divided.
It is difficult to understand why Mahāvira laid such great stress on nudity. Sir Monier Williams I gives what is at least a possible explanation. “The Jains,” he says, " like all other ascetics, were impressed with the idea that it was necessary to maintain a defensive warfare against the assault of evil passions, by keeping under the body and
• A way of gaining merit still practised among the Jaina. + S. B. E. xxii. 194. + Annual Address, A. S. B., 1898. S A Jaina tradition says that Mahāvira on joining the order had
only retained one cloth given to him by the god Indra. Buddhism. p. 530.