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Śramaņa, Vol 59, No. 3/July-September 2008
of the Jaina, the monk as well as the layman. According to the Jaina Scriptures, there are various ways of practising austerities, all of which are likewise solemnly started with the respective Pratyākhyānas, after accurately fixing their duration and to other items. With particular reference to Tapa, there are Pratyākhyānas by which the quality, quantity, and times of one's meals are reduced, from the simple giving up of special kinds of food, of eating at night, etc., and from partial fasts, and fasts of whole day or several days, up to fasts of more than a month's duration. There are further Pratyākhyānas by which one binds oneself to practise certain ascetical postures, to meditate for a fixed time, to devote a certain time to the regular study of the sacred and other religious Scriptures, or to the service of coreligionists, etc. Several forms of austerity are at the same recommended as strengthening and hardening one's bodily and mental powers, and as excellent furtherers of intellectual activity, as, e.g., the Āyambila Fast, a kind of bread-and-water diet which excludes all milk, fat, sugar, spices, etc., for a fixed time, and also certain Asanas, or ascetic postures, indeed prove to be. Of quite a different character is the austerity called Sallekhanā, or Samlekhanā, by which the individual solemnly resigns all food for the rest of his life, under formalities dealt with in the Āvaśyaka Sūtra, the whole last chapter of which is devoted exclusively to the subject “Pratyākhyāna." This form of austerity is indeed being recurred to by very religious people at the time when positively feel death approaching, and every hope of living on as vanished.
Thus it is true that Jainism allows, under certain circumstances, the vow of starvation. But it would be wrong to infer there from that its ideal is the extinguishment of personal activity at all. Just the contrary is true. Jainism promulgates self-realization as the aim of individual life : a self-realization which, at the same time, form the basis of the well-being of all that lives. The achievement of this self
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