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Pravrajyā: The Itinerant Life
549
Visvamitrās means, literally, universal friends. At first sight this expression may appear to involve a contradiction, for to be a mitrā, friend, presupposes a bond, an attachment. Have we not seen in fact that their incessant effort is directed towards freeing themselves from every bandha?67 Does not this study impress upon us at every moment that the ideal of a sādhvi is to be nirgranthi?
Here we must in imagination take up our stance alongside one who, through dikṣā, a voluntary act undertaken in full knowledge of its meaning, has renounced all connections and repudiated the grip of the temporal; she still lives, however, in a perishable body, though she is already in a state of life that transcends saṁsāra. Now, it is for this very reason that she is truly and authentically viśvamitră, a universal friend. For the nirgranthis, the whole world is their family, each jiva is a bandhu, a friend. The desire that all jivas should be freed and should reach nirvana must not stay in the realm of intention, but must be manifested in a concrete way. To be a śramani involves in the first place a work of personal purification, but also an effort to help others, to give support to their own efforts, a help which will be the more efficacious just because it is more disinterested. How can the śādhvis, without losing sight of the Three Jewels, help the śrāvakas, śrāvikas and all jivas? Through their teaching, in public or in private, a teaching which concentrates on Scripture and the doctrine as transmitted by tradition. Through this activity, which in itself, being a prolongation of svădhyāya, earns them merit, they contribute to an awakening, or to a keener degree of awakening, in the minds of those who listen attentively to them, of upayoga, the faculty of understanding and awareness, an understanding that must always be accompanied by right vision and perfect conduct.68
The most effective teaching of the sădhvis is that which they give through the testimony of their life. They incarnate the ideal in which
67 Cf. P 306 ff.
68 Cf. P 268 ff. No doubt the more directly doctrinal teaching has been given during the course of the centuries, and is still more usually given by the munis. However, the śādhvis have in the past and still do supplement this same teaching in their own way, which should not be belittled and which has more impact than one might believe from the outside.
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