Saturday, September 18, 2004

Why are you, or any other Jains, trying to use words with ordinarily

> Why are you, or any other Jains, trying to use words with ordinarily

> means a deeply intimate encounter with the Supreme Lord, and
> twist it to mean something else?

I, for one, as a Jain, tend to agree with the question you raise even
though your emotions are foreign to me. The "ordinary" meaning of the
word prayer cannot be dissassociated, at least in the minds of most
theists or animists etc. who postulate either a Supreme Lord or spirits or
super-natural entities, from some deeply associated notion of communion.
In particular when one talks to a Hindu or a Christian or a Muslim, prayer
has and can have one and only one meaning -- in the case of the former,
the deity at whom the prayer is aimed and in the latter, the Supreme Lord.
If you believe in Vedanta, then too, it is my understanding that prayer is
aimed at the Supreme or Universal Consciousness.

That is why I think that the Jain practice of what is (wrongly IMHO)
called prayer is so radical that in modern times, it ought not to be
called prayer at all -- if only for the simple reason that according to
Jains, there is nothing or no one to pray to. Jains pray in the same
outward form that Hindus pray, the words sound similar (e.g. Bhaktamar
stotra which to my mind is dripping with Hindu imagery) and many of the
puja rituals were self-consciously copied from Hindus. Yet, if you ask
most educated Jains (I mean people who have their Jain philosophy straight
-- not many around sadly) they will tell you that no "true" Jain would
pray to the Lord Arihant for anything -- it would be a sign that one has
not even begun to understand what Jainism is about.

In my family for example nobody ever uses the vernacular form "prarthana."
One uses "darshan" (glimpse) or if one is making ritual offerings one
calls it puja (worship). Some Jains worship idols (not all do) some the
books (not all do) and some nothing at all -- they make NO ritual
offerings (my family does but I think the other groups who don't may have
the better end of the argument here). But when they worship, it is a sign
of reverence and respect, much as a student making a grave and respectful
obeisance before a Nobel Prize winner before sitting down to take lessons.
It is not a sense of bowing before a superior or divine power that is
qualitatively different from oneself -- no Christian or Muslim would dare
do this -- it would be considered a vile sacrilege to make such a daring
comparison. By contrast, Jain sadhus are expressly forbidden to pray in
this sense or to do puja.

As an alternative consider the idea that when a "true" Jain "prays"
(s)he is not praying a la any theistic interpretation of prayer. Jain
prayer is an euphimism for meditation and invocation and as I have
said before, psychological reinforcement. As a Jain, I choose to
abide by some values. These values must, consistently, guide my all
actions big or samll. This is hard to do because we are human and
thus fallible. Here fallible means inconstant, unable to hold one
idea fixed in the mind for long, incapable of purging ourselves of
akrasia or weakness of the will, like the classical monkey dark and
intoxicated with rage who is unable to sit still for one moment. For
such fallible human beings, it is but human nature that we shall fail
to consistently implement our code of conduct.

Consider then the possibility that Jain philosophical ideas indicate that
*it is our failure to see that at all times it is our failure to follow
the code itself that is the cause of all grief* -- i.e. the Jain
philosophers realize(d) that in some measure self-reflexivity is the way
to cut the Gordian knot of misery and samsara. Why it should logically
follow that such enlightened self-recognition leading to the control of
one's actions leads to liberation of the soul or indeed whether there
exists a soul at all? What if there is no soul and no moksha?

We do not know these answers -- the all seeing perfect ones have told
us it is thus and thus we believe it to be. Hence Jainism like any
other belief system requires faith -- faith that there is a soul and
that right conduct is the way to liberation and that one is
responsible for one's own liberation. And it basically requires faith
that the great teachers, the arihantas were not wrong. That is all
though -- it requires no assumption of divinity, no assumption of
magic, supernatural or miracles -- it is relatively baggage free
(though once you postulate soul karma action and samsara, you have a
pretty large bag already) of stuff that one might call extra-human or
super-natural. Thus it does not need a God -- the soul and the
principle of Karma replace the notion of God in a sense.

From these basic principles, the Jains derive codes of conduct and
urge you to walk the path -- as with any journey, what the traveller
can narrate of their journey in a retelling of it is but an
infinitesimal fraction of the true experience (a map cannot describe
reality without becoming reality itself etc.) -- it is the
psychological transformation within that is the reward for the
journey. As with physical travel, one who has travelled realizes that
it is hopeless to try and explain what one has learnt to one who has
not travelled at all. It is a bit like trying to talk about jets and
germs to someone who has had at most a bad high-school geometry curse
(revealing slip wasn't that?) and no algebra at all.

In this schema, it is ourself that we are trying to improve and only
we can do that -- no external power can change our minds so praying to
someone else for material benefits is sort of missing the joke.
Consequently, Jain "prayer" is an affirmation of adherence to a code
established by the tirthankars, followed by the siddhas, preserved by
achrayyas, taught by the upadhyayas and preserved by the sa(d)hus.
Hence the panch parameshthi or the five supreme entities saluted in
the naokar mantra are venerated for having discovered, preserved and
taught as well as exemplified the right path -- it is their conduct
that one vows to emulate (however imperfectly) and to improve one's
own conduct by dwelling on how one has been imperfect, how one might
have responded differently, whether a different response would have
been bette and how one might resolve to deal with it next time. It is
this sort of mundane "reflection" that is the closest I can describe
to what "prayer" means to me.

Consequently, I do agree that there is no sense of communion with a
Supreme Lord in my mind when I "pray" since I deny the neccessity of a
Supreme Lord and if there need not be one then in my system of belief
anyway it is baroque and an offense againt logic to postulate one. I
will go further and say that if the Supreme entity is not required,
for one to exist would be superfluous and thus would negate the
essentiality that must axiomatically characterize a supreme being. At
least so I understand the traditional Jain argumnt(s) against the
notion of a Creator entity or a personal God.

Now of course this soul and moksha business that I and many other
Jains I know believe in is all perhaps still only one, perhaps highly
defective, and probably fairly simple-minded way to evade a deeper
more troubling question: - why do we need this elaborate edifice of
beleifs? What happens if we jettison all these things -- soul, kriya
and karma? It would be hard to govern our passions. And frightening
beyond belief. Thus all these assumptions and elaborations seem to me
at times to be little more than very baroque mechanisms to help us
bear the terrifying realization that after our death there may be
nothing -- the pure materialisis may be the one who turn out to have
the last laugh. None the less presently I call myself Jain because I
cannot face the fact that after my death it is just "game over"
flashing on some little video screen in the great network in the sky,
or that it is simply the ceasing to be of a random collection of
chemcials. So perhaps it is a bit more comforting to say that is a
soul that survives. But beyond that, why there should be a God is a
question I find quite meaningless. Thus the notion of praying or of
communion with some universal principle seems redundant to me.

I want to make it clear that personally, I now believe that the entire
notion of swarga and narak (heaven and hell respectively) the notion
of gods and goddesses etc. that Jains believe in were the result of a)
old aministic traditons that are intertwined with the roots of
pre-Mahavir Jainism (about which little can be deciphered directly)
and b) partly consciously adopted to ease the assimilation of
heretical (to Hindus) Jains in the midst of a mainstream community of
Hindu theists. Thus in modern times, when surrounding society does
not exert norm of conformance with respecct to religion as strongly as
in the past, I feel free to jettison the fantastic elements of Jain
mythology as pablum for the masses of that time and to concentrate on
the underlying psychical foundations and motivations that Jain
practice seeks to grapple with.

However, I still do find it disturbing to think that after we are gone
there may be nothing at all -- and that I find it disturbing that I
find it disturbing is even more disturbing etc.., so I seem to be a
Jain out of psychological weakness -- not a shining example of faith
either!!

This started out as a discussion of prayer, so let me end by saying
that the thought process that writing this has generated to me is the
same as "prayer" -- when I think of its effect on my psyche, I think
serious philosophical discussion is the closest thing to prayer that I
can think of as a Jain. It is the dialogue that enables me to see
more clearly what I understand and what I do not and what thus I need
to think about, read about and learn about more. It is part of the
journey. Prayer too is simply a part of the journey, though I agree
that we should call it something else -- Maybe Jain prayer instead of
prayer would be a more accurate term to always use but common usage
and human nature is against this. I do agree with you that Jains do
not pray in your sense -- the notion of prayer in your sense is
meaningless to me as a Jain and I think to some (many?) other Jains as
well.

One final thought: I think that the whole stuff about colors and healing
power of prayer etc. needs to behandled with extreme care and with hugely
more precision than it is being handled at present in this discussion.
Does prayer improve one's psychological state? Maybe. Can this have a
healing effect -- certainly can make things more bearable as in the effect
of an opiate but can it cure cancer? No way. Can one see a golden glow
when one recites naokars? maybe. Can this elevate one's sprit?
Possibly. Can this golden glow cure a fever? Pretty doubtful. One
*must* distinguish between pshychological state alteration and physical
miracles. Prayer (meditation) has psychological effects and these may be
*very* useful to a physican as part of a tool kit of phramacological
concoctions, surgical and non-invasive procedures and psychological tools,
but to claim that prayer can cure cancer is a meat product of a kind I
will not name.

I personally prefer to disassociate this sort of what I call psychic
charlatanry from serious meditation and philosophical discussion -- the
former i best left IMHO to weak-minded and credulous people. My impression
is that above all Jainism is empirical-logical at heart, it is most
emphatically not a religion based on blind faith in any super-powered
entity. Anything that mitigates this basic thrust is anathema.

Back to lurking for a while.

rajib

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