Notes on Modern Jainism

Author(s): Mrs Sinclair Stevenson
Publisher: Oxford

Page 50

MODERN JAINISM.
The Svetambara, as a rule, only go to those villages where there are Upasarā, i. e. separate buildings erected by each sect for their monks or nuns.
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The Upasaro Upasaro is a large bare hall without bathrooms or cooking places, furnished only with wooden beds. These beds the monks or nuns are forbidden by their rule to possess, but they are lent for an indefinite period by charitable lay people, who do not expect to get them back again. The beds occasionally have the name of the lenders carved on them, that there may be no doubt as to whom the merit of lending them belongs.
The ascetics live on the alms of the charitable, and as each of the three sects have rather different rules for begging, it may be worth going into the subject in detail.
Begging.
No ascetics of any sect may sit in a layman's house to eat food; nor will they accept food specially cooked for them, but only some of that which is being prepared for the household, and they are never allowed to knock at closed doors, but only to enter doors already opened.
Svetambara will usually accept food from people of the Vania, Brahman and Ksatriya caste; in Gujarat however they will not accept food from Ksatriya.
Sthanakavasi, failing Vania and Brahmans, will accept food from the Shepherd caste.
Neither a Svetambara nor a Sthanakavasi will accept food taken to the Upasaro for them by a layman. The Svetambara, however, will accept an invitation to go to a layman's house in order to fetch food and to take it back to the Upasaro; this a Sthanakavāsi will not do.