Practical Path

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

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THE PRACTICAL PATH.
Prolonged meditation coupled with fasting is its characteristic. The layman should try to spend a whole day, four times in a month, in holy meditation, and should observe fasting on those days.
(xii) Sharing one's food with some holy monk, or a pious śrâvaka (house-holder), and giving him presents of books and other useful articles at least once a year. This implies that one should also eat the same food as is offered to the guest.
In addition to these twelve, there is another vow which a man on the point of death is expected to take. Its object is to be inferred from the following formula in which it is generally worded:
"I vow to abstain from food and drink and fruits and sopari (betel-nut) as long as I live."
Terrible and cruel as this last vow may appear to the uninitiated, it is the severest form of austerity, and, therefore, leads to the greatest prosperity in the next life. There is no idea of suicide involved in the operation of this vow, since it is only taken when the last remaining hope of life is given up. At that supreme moment of life, when fate may be said to be trembling in the balance, the successful carrying out of a terrible resolve like this is an ample guarantee of future happiness, for the exertion of will to adhere to its resolve, in the trying moments of a departing life, goes a long way to remove its negativity, and thereby enables the soul to attain to the region of heavens where pain and misery are the least known.