ABSTRACT
The idea behind this unusual restriction on the begging and consumption habits among Jaina monks was the interdiction of violence (hiôsâ) in any form, including that affecting food and drink.198 Just as the monastic community was prohibited from taking the life of living beings by treading on them while
walking, sitting, sleeping, defecating etc., it was also prohibited from consuming any form of food which would contain flesh of animals etc. Monks (and nuns in the case of the Œvetâmbaras) were also required to inspect their food to see whether they were any stray living beings, such as insects etc. In other words, the only permitted food was ‘lifeless’, i.e. that which did not directly contain living beings or did not involved any serious violence related to the procurement of such food. The same also applied to water, believed to contain life not only in the form of some tiny or even invisible creatures, but also living souls embodied in water particles. Since all kinds of fresh water were thus not permissible, monks had to be offered boiled water in which no living beings were known to exist, but water which was cooled down so that even ‘fiery’ living beings (whose bodies were made of fire particles, occasionally present also in hot water) were absent. Clearly, the process of boiling water and cooling it down did involve violence, but all the moral guilt (hiôsâ) was ceded to the lay community. As a kind of compensation, lay followers who offered begging monks alms in the form of food and water, etc., earned auspicious karman by fulfilling their primary religious obligation of dâna, or gifting, consisting of the so called dânavrâta, or ‘the most important single element in the practice of the religion for, without almsgiving by the laity, there could be no ascetics and therefore no transmission of the sacred doctrine’ (WILLIAMS 1963: 149).199 No doubt lay followers had to face the consequences of taking the life of, say, living beings which inhabited water and which would ultimately die in the process of boiling and cooling. Clearly, that was hiôsâ, but, as Jaina monks themselves explained, the merits of the vow of giving and of providing monks with food and water outweighed the possible demerits that the preparation of admissible food and water involved. Since monks were required not to accept any food or water specially prepared for them, they incurred no demerit which an incitement to the hiôsâ of preparation of food and boiling of water would involve. Monks’ dependency on the lay community in terms of food, water and shelter and the contingency of the lay community’s merit on the existence of monks’ community were two sides of one and the same symbiosis. The custom of accepting boiled water as alms already had to presuppose the existence of a larger lay community of Jaina devotees who would be prepared to serve proper food and water to monks. The precondition of giving alms to Jaina ascetics was both the knowledge of what kind of food and drink was suitable for them and the acceptance of such customs. Even though giving alms was a universally accepted code of behaviour in India throughout the centuries, it is nevertheless hardly conceivable that followers of other religious traditions would have gone to the extent of daily preparations of suitable water (by boiling it and cooling it down), even for the simple fact that this would require their good knowledge and ethical justification of such a custom.
