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The Śramani: The Worker
straw or wood.198 Before settling down to sleep, which they sometimes do together and sometimes separately, for certain ones stay awake, the Murtipūjaka sädhvis, after performing the laghu-vandana and reciting the sāmāyika-sūtra, recite the saṁstara-pauruși-sūtras. 199 These are sixteen short, deeply meaningful sūtras, a sort of profession of faith through re-affirmation of belief in the doctrine. In this way, during the hours of repose, the sadhvis remain in this same spirit of devotion to those essential values which will most surely lead them onwards towards Liberation.
Sleep is a temporary departure from the scene which might well turn into the Great Departure, for who knows whether she will wake up the next morning? Each evening the sadhvis must be in the right frame of mind for departure, that of aparigraha, seeking refuge and protection in the dharma.
The sixteen sūtras form a remarkable synthesis:
- permission is requested from the guruni to perform this rite before going to sleep;
this latter indicates the posture in which the body should take
repose;
and proceeds to exhort the ascetics to reflect deeply;
then follows praise to the arhats, the siddhas, the sadhus, and to the dharma taught by the kevalins - these comprising the four refuges; the sädhvis then make an act of mental renunciation of the body and all its activities;
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they renounce the eighteen papasthānas, activities which produce bad karmas;
198
The term samstara is also used, by an extension of meaning, for the period of complete fast which preceds the Great Departure, when a sadhvi has chosen, of her own free will, to terminate this earthly existence; saṁstāra still denotes a bed or couch, but now no longer that of temporal sleep but that of the final sleep of this present bodily sheath; cf. P 566 ff.
199 In the sampradayas where these sutras are not recited, one must go to rest in the frame of mind that they express.
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