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MAHAVIRA'S PREDECESSORS science he practised austerities for eighty-three days, and during this time an enemy, Kamatha, caused a heavy downpour of rain to fall on him, so that these austerities might be made as trying to flesh and blood as possible, Now this enemy was no one else than the Brāhman ascetic whose carelessness in a previous incarnation had so nearly caused the death of the poor snake. But if Pārsvanātha's enemies were active, his grateful friends were no less mindful of him, and the snake, who by now had become the god Dharaṇendra, held a serpent's hood over the ascetic, and sheltered him as with an umbrella; and to this day the saint's symbol is a hooded serpent's head. On the eighty-fourth day Pārsvanātha obtained Kevala jñana seated under a Dhātaki tree near Benares.
He now became the head of an enormous community, his mother and wife being his first disciples. Followed by these, he preached his doctrines for seventy years, until at last his karma was exhausted, and, an old man of a hundred years, he reached deliverance at last on Mount Sameta Sikhara in Bengal, which was thenceforth known as the Mount of Pārsvanātha.
Pārsvanātha made four vows binding on the members The four of his community: not to take life, not to lie, not to steal vows of
Pärsvaand not to own property. He doubtless felt that the vow of nātha. chastity and celibacy was included under the last two heads, but in the two hundred and fifty years that elapsed between his death and the coming of Mahāvira, abuses became so rife that the latter was forced to add another vow-that of chastity—to those already enumerated. This he did by divid. ing the vow of property specifically into two, one part relating to women and the other to material possessions. Some Jaina, however, believe that Pārsvanātha's four vows were those of non-killing, non-lying, non-stealing and chastity, that it was the promise to keep nothing as one's own possession that Mahāvira added to these, and that it was in order to keep this vow that Mahāvira himself went about naked.
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