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