This is a thread arising from a discussion with Mr. Nanning beginning at
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,2687.msg274915.html#msg274915in the thread on cars and more cars. I'll kick it off with what some would call an extreme example: i quote Mehta in a book called "Maximum City"
"a family in the diamond market that is about to renounce the world—take diksha"
"they are Jains. They are becoming monks in a religion which for 2,500 years has been built on the extreme abjuration of violence."
"this family of five—a father and mother in their early forties, their nineteen-year-old son, and seventeen-year-old twins, a son and a daughter—are going to leave this flat, this city, and everything they own. They will spend the rest of their lives wandering on the rural highways of the country, the men and the women separated, never to be a family again."
"In one month, they will go to the Gujarat town and give away, physically throw away, everything"
"Sevantibhai came across a sentence that electrified him. “Are you going to be dismissed or will you resign?” "
"For the last few years, Sevantibhai had been progressively renouncing modernity. He had already ceased using allopathic medicine ... Next to go was diesel and petrol. He gave up using automobiles. Sevantibhai impresses upon me the great sins committed during the extraction of fossil fuel ... Then went electricity. For the last seven years, Sevantibhai has been living in his Bombay high-rise flat without electric lights or appliances."
"The only way to reach moksha is to renounce the world, to take diksha. Sevantibhai says it was not he, but his older son and his wife, who first felt the strong urge to take diksha."
"The extended family was hoping that Sevantibhai would come to his senses, and they were trying to delay his departure till he did. But his determination to go was stronger than their will to hold him back in the world. And now, finally, in a month’s time, all five of them will say good-bye: to samsara, to Bombay, to modernity."
"They will be walking constantly, observing the five vows: no violence, no untruth, no stealing, no sex, no attachments. They will be wearing two white unstitched pieces of cloth, nothing else ... they will have no shoes, no vehicles, no telephone, no electricity. "
"the Diamond Merchants’ Association Hall a few days later, there is a large banner on the wall: HEARTY WELCOME TO THE MOKSHA - STRIVING JEWELS . The renunciates—diksharthis—are to be felicitated by the wealthy community of diamond merchants."
"You would not know the wealth of these men from their clothes."
"Arunbhai, dressed simply in a white half-sleeved shirt but a billionaire in any currency, tells us that a few years ago his mother had also wanted to take diksha. He convinced her against it. But he speaks of the monk’s life with yearning, as something he will have to do sooner or later."
"now, Sevantibhai Chimanlal Ladhani, the dark little man with the easy smile, is not just a moderately successful diamond merchant. He has become a figure of power, a leader on the path that even the billionaire Arunbhai will have to tread sooner or later. At one bound, he has surpassed people far more successful in business than he. He is now, in this hall, in this afternoon, the subject of their admiration, even of their envy."
"a Bombay girl who now will never go to a movie, put on makeup, go on a date, or go to college. She will never return to the city she grew up in."
"an enormous mob, for Sevantibhai and Rakshaben are literally throwing money away. They fling out their arms, scattering rice mixed with gold and silver coins and currency notes ... They are unburdened."
"peasants have been lined up for hours, to get gifts of grain and cloth from Sevantibhai’s fortune."
"Sevantibhai’s guests have been fed for seven days. Today, on the eighth and final day, every single person in the fifty-seven villages of the district of Dhanera has been invited for a grand feast. Thirty-five thousand people sit side by side for the meal—men and women in separate tents ... The village leaders have been instructed to prepare the ingredients using the old ways: the water is from wells, not taps; the oil is pressed by bullocks; the vessels are handmade brass; the ghee is from the local cows, not buffaloes; the sugar and the jaggery are organic; the grain and vegetables have all been grown locally ... On the eve of the twenty-first century, it is still possible to prepare a strictly Jain meal, grown and cooked locally, and feed thirty-five thousand people with minimum harm to the planet."
"During the last meal, the entire extended family—a hundred strong—feed them, one last time, with their hands. After today there can be no pleasure permissible in food"
“I’ve been trying to think, but I keep getting disturbed. I’m thinking, What will I do after tomorrow? Where will I be? I’ve been sick, I have a temperature, and right now I have all the facilities, they’re pressing my arms and my legs, but I think, How will I tolerate this sickness after tomorrow?”
"Big steel plates are put down in a line outside their room, filled with rice, coins, precious stones, and the keys to their various houses. I am standing near the first plate. Sevantibhai emerges at great speed, clad in his most extravagant costume, and kicks aside the plate full of his wealth. Then his wife and children do the same thing, all in a line"
"Sevanti and Raksha have been married for twenty-two years. The last time they touch each other is when Raksha puts the tilak on Sevanti’s face, as she did the first time she touched him—when she married him."
"the first day of their lives as renunciates, they will set out to gather their first meal—they have fasted all the previous day—and the first house they will go to is the Ladhanis’. It is a fitting metaphor for renunciation: The first house you beg in should be the one you’ve left as its owner."
"there is an insurance policy for the Ladhanis in case the path to moksha gets too steep, as has happened with other renunciates. A trust has been set up with four family members as trustees, endowed with a sizable fund ... It will disburse money on Sevantibhai’s instructions. In his wanderings, when he meets needy people or deserving institutions, the trustees will send money to them. “In case the children want to come back, they don’t have to stretch out their hand to anybody." ... It is a strange concept: a wandering monk able to fund a temple or change the fortunes of an entire village ... Is the life of a renunciate made easier or harder when he knows that if he returns to samsara, he can immediately have the goods of life back? Sevantibhai and his family will always have a choice. Each step of their wanderings will be taken out of free will. Whenever they are tired from walking in the hot sun, something at the back of their minds will always be telling them that they can afford to travel in a Rolls-Royce, even now. All they have to do is to admit defeat."
"Seven months after the diksha ceremony, I go to see how Sevantibhai is doing in his life as a monk ... all the hair on his head, face, and lips had been pulled out, hair by hair, tuft by tuft, over a period of several hours ... His scalp was bleeding."
"He can’t own anything, not even the single cotton sheet he wears on his body. It has to be gifted by a layman."
"I ask him what was the hardest to give up: his family, his wealth, or his house and its comforts? After a long pause, he answers. “Family. The hardest thing to leave was family.”"
" In their wanderings, the monks try to look for unpaved roads, which are getting rarer and rarer ... Every day they walked eighteen miles, five hours in the morning after sunrise and more in the evening ... He shows me the soles of his feet. These are abused feet: cracked, callused, split, and blackened, with layers of skin overlapping each other, cratered like the surface of the moon ... Many sadhus these days die in accidents on the highway"
"There are other orders of Jain monks, such as the Sthanakvasis, who make a voluntary exit from the sinful world. They simply stop eating and invite laypeople to their retreat hall to watch them slowly starve to death. But Sevantibhai’s order is more rigorous. “We don’t have the freedom of suicide. There are no shortcuts to the next birth.” There is one exception, however. If Sevantibhai were to find the pull of samsara too great, if he were unable to follow the rules of the order, suicide is preferable to going back to the world."
"The monks have bad breath—they are forbidden to brush their teeth, as the very purpose of brushing is to kill bacteria—and it is an effort to talk to them at close quarters."
"the younger boy developed jaundice and now is allowed to eat twice a day."
"It is not easy to talk about the Jains without ridiculing them."
"Sevantibhai’s search is rigorous; there is absolutely no room for compromise."
"Wandering through the villages of Gujarat, Sevantibhai is thinking about the great questions, about the purpose and order of the universe, about the stupidity of nationalism, about the atomic nature of reality. More than anybody else I know, he lives with a daily and nagging realization of the amount of violence our species perpetrates, each hour, each minute, not only on our fellow humans but on all life and upon creation itself."
"Sevantibhai has decisively rejected every value held dear by the middle classes: western education, consumerism, nationalism, and, most important, family. But the people he rejected come to him now with reverence; merchants with firms considerably larger than his, who would not have socialized with him in the life he has left, now travel great distances to bow before him and touch his feet"
"some of the most sophisticated epistemology that human beings have ever produced. Where Aristotelian logic admits only two possible states of being for a proposition, that it is true or false—there is no middle ground—Jain logic expands these to no fewer than seven possibilities."
"For a long time afterward, in my life in the cities, I think of Sevantibhai, of the utter final simplicity of his life. In New York I am beset with financial worry ... Approaching the middle of my life, I feel poorer every day compared to my friends ... I am earning more than I ever have before, and I am also feeling poorer than ever before. Each time it feels like I almost have it within reach at last—financial security (if not wealth), a working family, a career—it slips out of my grasp ..."
"Sevantibhai has just bypassed all this ... Before anything can be taken from him, he has given it away himself. And I continue on my way, always accumulating the things I will eventually lose and always anxious either about not having enough of them or, when I have them, about losing them. Anxious, too, about death. The greatest violence is your own death—that is, if you fight it. Sevantibhai has even triumphed over death. He has divested himself of everything—family, possessions, pleasure—that is death’s due. All that remains is his body, to which he has renounced title in advance and treats as a borrowed, soiled shirt. He can’t wait to take it off. Sevantibhai has beat death to the end. He has resigned before he could be dismissed."
"Maximum City," Suketu Mehta, 1998, ISBN 9780307574312
I should mention here that i know many Jains and many in the diamond trade. Of these, a substantial number are very, very rich people and a surprising number of them do take the diksha path. And never return to samsara, to the world. They are given great honor, and as Mehta says, billionaires travel to see and bow before them.
But there are very few Jains compared to the masses in India, who all have their separate ways to salvation and to hell.
sidd
