The sound of silence inside the sanctum of the Jal Mandir at Pawapuri – located in the Nalanda district of Bihar – which marks the cremation spot of Mahavira, is overwhelming. It is a still moment in a world of cacophony even as one pays obeisance to the engraved foot impression of Mahavira there. The meditative moment takes me back to the Jaina tradition, which puts Mahavira as one of a chain of teachers, one among a galaxy of deified men, in fact, the last of the 24 Tirthankaras, ‘ford-makers’, who will guide and navigate ignorant minds across the ocean of suffering.
From Rishabhadeva and Parsvanatha to Mahavira, these Tirthankaras are hailed as Jina, the conqueror, from which the Sanskrit word Jaina itself is derived. Mahavira, the Great Hero, is the culminating fulfilment of this chain in the Jaina tradition, in his search and acquisition of perfect knowledge, embodied in the great renunciation and austerities of his life. The Jaina teachings of Right Faith, Right Knowledge and Right Practice laid down the fountainhead of Jaina thought, of a moral and ethical way of living to be aspired to, which will take the seeker on the spiritual path.
There is a beautiful passage in the Acharanga, the ancient Svetambara text, which describes how Mahavira’s thought matured in his 12 years of austerities. He attributed Jiva, life, not only to animals and plants but to material objects like earth and water, realised the real cause of wordly misery to be Karma, engendered by indulgence in sensual pleasures, and the endless misery of life to this rather needless cycle of birth and death. According to Jaina lore, Mahavira was born with three types of knowledge, acquired the fourth at the beginning of his monkhood, and achieved his Arhat state under a Sala tree at the end of 12 years of austerities.
The Jaina metaphysics of Syadvada and Anekantavada, the theory of the many-sidedness of reality, was a philosophical elaboration of the speculative thought of Mahavira himself. This metaphysical dialectic of relativity, of different views and perspectives allowed the Jaina tradition to dissect the empirical world psychologically, and in doing so, showed up the relativity of the mind itself. The Jaina thought is positioned midway between the Vedantic assertion of Brahmn as Absolute and the Buddhist postulation of ‘Change as Permanent’, and throws up a pragmatic blueprint for a more peaceful coexistence, where all views are accommodated out of the belief that all minds are relatively conditioned and thereby interdependent actually.