Risabha Deva

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Jain Mitra Mandal

Page 53

OMNISCIENCE
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Risabha Deva brought much accumulated merit of tapaścharana with Him from His previous lives. His Soul's inner forces were developed to such an extent that He possessed the most indomitable will, against which calamity and trouble knocked their heads in vain. He was even able to live without food and water for the whole Period that He remained immersed in holy meditation, and for six months more thereafter when no one knew how to offer Him food properly. Death had itself received a deathblow from His hand ; and starvation could only release Him for ever from the tyranny of the flesh, if it could destroy His body!
Feerless, self-centred, self-controlled, the WORLD TEACHER moved about for a long period of time, engaged in holy meditation. He performed the seversst austerities and tapaścharana, to eradicate his karmas and thereby to separate His Soul from matter. At last His tapaścharana bore the desired fruit; on the eleventh of the first, that is to say, the dark, half of the month of Phālaguna in the Uttarāsādha (sagi taroiass) Nakshatra (constellation) the veil of the Temple of Divinity was destroyed completely, and the Effulgence of Knowledge Divine, that is, full, all-embracing OMNISCIENCE, which like lightning, shines in one part but reveals tbe whole universe, flooded His Consciousness from within! He was then sitting uuder a banyan tree in the Sakata forest close to the town of Purimatala.
Omniscience is not acquired as a gift from any one, nor is consciousness like a mirror that needs the