Sannyasa Dharma

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

Page 57

SANNYASA DHARMA Nudity was also a sign of world-renunciation amongst the Arabs, about whom Washington Irving says in his Life of Mahomet (Appendix) :--
“The Towaf, or procession, round the Caaba was an ancient cere. mony observed before the time of Mahomet, and performed by both sexes entirely naked, bomet prohibited this exposure and
prescribed the Ibram, or pilgrim dress.”
In India there are nangā (naked) sūdhus also amongst the Hindus. Louis Jacolliot says (see 'The Occult Science in India, page 71) :-" The sannyasis remained naked.” This was with reference to Indian saints generally. Buddha's contemporaries, Mankhali Gośāl and Puran Kasyapa, both went naked. The seamless coat of Christ (St. John xix. 23) is suggestive of bare skin esoterically.
Non-BATHING.-The saint is not allowed to bathe. For that will be fixing his attention on the body. There is no question of dirt or untidiness. He has no time to think of bathing or of cleaning his teeth. He has to prepare himself for the greatest contest in his career, namely, the struggle against Death, and cannot afford to waste his time and opportunity in attending to the beautification and embellishment of his outward person. Nay, he knows fully that death appears only in the form of the physical person which is a compound and, as such, liable by nature to dissolution and disintegration. He, therefore, smiles at the childish simplicity of the worldly-wise who long for immortality no less than he does himself, but do the very thing which pampers and
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