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Sugandha: Sweet Fragrance
and counselled her, in view of her youthfulness, to wait before speaking further of dikṣā. Nothing persuaded her. The parents-in-law in great consternation, informed her parents, who arrived the following day, when Panna was pursuing her fast and the news was spreading throughout the village. Her father, touched to the quick, after trying in vain to reason with her, resigned himself to the prospect of granting the desired permission. Before them all, he declared that, having given her in marriage against her will and having now been defeated by this so sudden widowhood, he could no longer oppose her desire. The other family-members unanimously agreed, and, to Panna's great joy, they left her free to rejoing the sãdhvis.
Four years after the marriage, Pannă received dikṣā and became Sadhvi Punya. Punya means well-being, virtue, merit, that which is!. propitious, pleasant, beautiful, purifying.
The perseverance shown by Sadhvi Punya before dikṣā is not, particularly in the Jaina milieu of Rājasthāna, anything very extraordinary, as other biographies, with slightly differing details, prove and contemporary sädhvis say that they too came up against the same family resistance. Sadhvi Punya gives us in all simplicity the testimony of a Daughter of the Desert reared in the Jaina tradition.
A fervent Sådhvi, Guruņi, Pioneer
After her description of the dikṣā, Sādhvi Sajjana accords a position of prime importance - which is as it should be to the question of vihara and we find ourselves, along with the group to which the young Sadhvi Punya belongs, on the rocky or sandy roads, in the burning heat of summer and also in the icy cold of winter, for the cold can be so intense that it gives rise to a sharp sensation in the feet "like that of a scorpion-sting."18
18 Ibid.,
In the course of the vihara, one was obliged not only to endure a harsh climate, but also to face epidemics of cholera or plague, which were common in those days and did not spare the sadhvis. At Jayapura
pp.
579
145-146.
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