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Ratnakarandaka-śrāvakācāra
O Lord ! May Your protective shadow be always on my head and may I attain a pious and passionless death (samādhi maraṇa) at Your doorstep.
Such an exalted place is accorded to sallekhanā in Jaina religious tradition! Sallekhanā surely must be embraced, as a vow, at the time of death. But death has its own strange ways of making appearance and, therefore, the idea of attaining a pious and passionless death must fill the mind, through and through, of a householder (śrāvaka) from an early stage of his spiritual development if he wishes to unfailingly impart ineffable worth to his present life.
Sallekhanā – the logical way to complete the journey of life All worldly souls (samsārī jīvas) are embodied according to their individual spiritual status, and are subject to the cycle of births and deaths. The body, associated with each soul, is subject to growth, old age, decay and death. Death entails that the soul must quit the existing body to acquire a fresh body consistent with and determined by the record of the karmic conditions, of which the soul itself is a repository. One of the most contentious issues in metaphysics is the relationship between the soul and the body. The Jaina metaphysics holds that the two are entirely different entities but live together for a certain period of time and then depart.
From the point of view of the modes in bondage, owing to the influence of karmas, the soul is corporeal in the embodied state. From the point of view of its pure nature, the soul is incorporeal. Though the soul is one with the body in the embodied state, it is different from the body because of its distinctive characteristics. The corporeal nature of the soul is predicated in the nonabsolutistic or relativistic sense only. From one point of view the soul is incorporeal, but from another point of view it is corporeal. A person is deluded when he identifies an animate object, soul (jīva),
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