Detail, Pilgrimage to a Jain Shrine c. 1850

Compared to the Jains of India, the Quakers and other pietists seem positively warlike. I am currently reading William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009). In it, a Jain adept describes her initiation:

[W]e were led back onto the stage, and told our new names. I was no longer Rekha; for the first time in my life I was addressed as Prasannamati Mataji…. Then we were both lectured by our guruji. He told us clearly what was expected of us: never again to use a vehicle [to avoid crushing insects], to take food only once a day, not to use Western medicine, to abstain from emotion, never to hurt any living creature. He told us we must not react to attacks, must not beg, must not cry, must not complain, must not demand, must not feel superiority, must learn not to be disturbed by illusory things. He told us we must be the lions that kill the elephant of sexual desire. He told us we must cultivate a revulsion for the world, and a deep desire for release and salvation. And he told us all the different kinds of difficulties we should be prepared to bear: hunger, thirst, cold, heat, mosquitoes. He warned us that none of this would be easy.

As they would walk along, Jains would sweep a peacock feather fan in front of them lest they inadvertently took the life of any creature, regardless how small. During the wet monsoon season, they stayed indoors because the omnipresent puddles were teeming with microscopic life.

Dalrymple’s source, a Jain nun called Prasannamati, blamed herself for being closely attached for twenty years to another Jain nun until the latter died of tuberculosis and malaria. Toward the end, the friend gradually cut down on her intake of food until she in effect died of starvation. Although she was only 38 years old and still healthy, Prasannamati was in the beginning stages of the same kind of starvation suicide, called sallekhana.

As Prasannamati said to her questioner, “Sallekhana is the aim of all Jain [monks or nuns]. First you give up your home, then your possessions. Finally you give up your body.”