ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the influence of Srimad Rajacandra’s lay status and his teaching about self-realisation and guru bhakti on the development of his following as a lay movement. It represents the beliefs and practices of Srimad Rajacandra’s followers from the perspective of the practitioners themselves, and provides a brief outline of the movement’s organisational structure. Srimad Rajacandra’s interpretation of self-realisation as a religious experience and the essential criterion for religious authority endorses the religious authority of lay gurus, while mendicant religious authority is put into dispute by the shadow of sectarianism. His followers are unofficially barred from aspiring to mendicancy because initiation would place them, technically at least, higher than Srimad Rajacandra the spiritual hierarchy of Jainism. From an ethical viewpoint the attraction seems to be the stand that Srimad Rajacandra’s teachings take against sectarianism and what is perceived to be an inadequate level of mendi-cant spiritual purity.
