How I Grew Up With And Grew Apart From Jainism

Copyrighted by Reena Shah

It is Paryushan, a time of prayer, penitence and abstention that all Jains, and almost everyone in my family and my childhood community observes with a reverence I no longer share.

For years, I have been an outsider looking in on rituals that far from evoking devotion, don’t stir a shred of religious feeling in me. For many Gujarati Jains, among whom I was raised, their religious practice boils down to conforming to a series of dietary abstentions and fasts that earn them a pious sheen. Even fallen Jains opt for a quick spiritual makeover during Paryushan to demonstrate they still belong to the flock. I rebelled against this cosmetic compliance long ago.

And yet I’ve never slammed the door officially shut or converted to another religion that wowed me as being the perfect package of salvation.

The fundamental problem I have with Jainism is its unrelenting pessimism. Jainism 101: Man’s very existence is sinful because to fulfill his needs, he has to cause suffering to other creatures. Our animalistic nature spurs us to indulge in cruelty to others and blinds us from realizing our inherent divinity. So break out of this cycle of causing suffering to others. Be ascetic, righteous and non-violent to achieve self-knowledge. So what if you suffer or starve? The body is but a temporal distraction. Your soul will be freed of its bodily shackles to attain nirvana.

Buddhism and Jainism both figured this out. The Buddha was the Enlightened One. The Jinas (the root of the word “Jain”) were the Conquerors of human frailty.

Gautama Buddha’s answer was to steer away from extremes and follow the Middle Path between indulgence and self-mortification. He also encouraged his followers to spread the word. Jainism venerates 24 tirthankars or men who realized their latent divinity, the last being Vardhaman Mahavir, an older contemporary of the Buddha.

Jainism’s path of self-abnegation did not find as many preachers or takers. Jainism had a headstart, but its competitor, Buddhism, benefited from better marketing and charismatic salesmanship of a more user-friendly product and won a significantly larger, international following. Today, there are thought to be 350-million Buddhists. There are 8-million Jains, mostly in India.

Jainism’s self-mortification has its own logic, but not one that made sense to me. Why would God create a world, populate it with highly intelligent creatures and then rig it all by insisting they should not delight in its beauty because they were inherently sinful? Even if one believes there is no single, all-powerful Creator, the idea of life as a pleasureless journey during which one chooses suffering and self-denial to gradually stamp oneself out is negative and unappealing.

The central principle of Jainism is non-violence. Observant Jains are not just vegetarian. They do not eat foods that are dug from under the ground, such as potatoes and carrots, because the act of digging is thought to hurt soil organisms. They shun leather and silk, and anything derived from causing injury to other living things. They meditate and fast in varying degrees of severity. A milestone of piety is to fast on alternate days for an entire year, a feat even children sometimes achieve. Monks wear cotton masks over their mouths so they do not swallow tiny insects accidentally. They travel everywhere on bare feet and periodically swish a soft brush around themselves so no tiny insects will get trodden by them. When they get ordained, these monks do not shave their heads, but pull their hair out by the roots to demonstrate they are oblivious to bodily pain.

Growing up Jain, I naturally had questions about all the prohibitions we had to practice in order to be considered virtuous. Why did I have to utter prayers and say the rosary in a language I could not understand, seated for a whole hour on a little mat? Why were potatoes pariahs in our kitchens? Why were onions odious and eggplant evil? These were questions the adults who enforced these practices couldn’t quite explain other than to say that was just how people wiser than us had made these rules, rules that generations of people had managed to follow without asking pesky questions. Everything one did had degrees of sin attached to it, and the Jain way was apparently the correct way to get through life with the best score.

That did not stop the questions. Would people who enjoyed onions but did lots of good deeds be barred from heaven? Jains drink boiled water but wasn’t the act of boiling water sinful because we kill germs? Were hydroponically grown potatoes acceptable, or was there something irredeemably evil about tubers? Was eating a sprouted bean really less sinful than eating an unfertilized egg that would never hatch into a chicken?

Some of the prohibitions didn’t make any sense. Roots and underground tubers were considered sinful to eat because digging them was thought to harm to insects and soil organisms. But ginger and turmeric were okay.

Eating greens was forbidden during Paryushan, the annual ritual of temperance and fasting (“See how advanced science was in those days! Our ancestors wanted to prevent people from eating foods that were likely to be infested with worms during the rainy season.”) But when dehydrated peas, and then frozen ones, started being available, people weren’t sure which side of the rules these were on. How about the beneficial properties of garlic? Was swallowing garlic capsules from medicine bottles permitted?

Honey was forbidden because it was apparently teeming with unseen little organisms, but yogurt was fine. Why couldn’t someone just admit this was what was accepted in scientific belief back in olden times, and yes, maybe Jainism did perhaps have the scoop on microbiology when it declared way back in B.C., long before microscopes came along, that invisible organisms exist everywhere. But couldn’t there be some way that new scientific theories could be acknowledged and integrated into our beliefs?

My mother took me to a Jain monk so he could better answer my questions. After listening to me, he turned to her and said, “Your daughter doubts too much.” To me, he said: “To be religious, one needs faith. You doubt too much.” A lot of my faith died right then.

I had the feeling that people who didn’t know much about science or care to know about it had been arbitrarily turning their blind beliefs and personal fetishes into rules for everyone else to follow. I went through the motions of observing certain rituals to please my elders. Gujaratis are an unabashedly acquisitive people who turn to finicky dietary rules and penances to earn their “Get Out of Jail” cards periodically. The complicated rituals of deprivation they follow give them the comfort of virtual asceticism without having to make any real sacrifices of wealth and comfort. I felt repelled by what I saw around me, but then was my dishonesty any better than the token compliance that bothered me? I stopped pretending.

The entrepreneurial Jains have spread across India and more recently, migrated overseas, carving out a reputation for being hard-working and prosperous. But their outdated religious practices have not been as market-responsive or customer-savvy as the trades they ply with such seat-of-the-pants acumen.

Ironically, Jainism started as a progressive backlash against the ritualism and idolatry of Hinduism and then fell into comfortable trap all organized religions do when they prefer not to get off their cushions of dogma. What a fiery revolutionary Mahavira must have been to defy the Brahminical establishment with his nakedness and declare he would follow his inner compass to seek his own truth! He made his teachings available in Prakrit, the language of the common people, during a time when the Brahmins purposely confined Hindu rituals to the aristocratic Sanskrit language. But Prakrit is a dead language now and many old Jain teachings remain largely untranslated and unavailable to modern practitioners.

If Jainism was such a rebellious and scientifically inclined religion in its early days, why has it been reluctant to integrate modern physical and environmental sciences into its current body of belief? Its principles of respect for life, non-violence and limiting consumption of resources would make it the world’s first green religion. Its do-it-yourself approach to salvation would be so appealing to our generation. How relevant it would be, especially to the young, if this combination of environmental awareness and personal responsibility evolved beyond villainizing vegetables to issuing prohibitions such as limiting the use of fossil fuels and plastic that imperil our planet.

Yet Jainism’s practice largely consists of following ossified rituals conducted in the dead languages, rather than examining the spiritual lode underlying its texts. If its narrow-minded asceticism has been so liberating, where are all the great philantropists, reformers, artists, musicians and poets who should have emerged out of this superior ideology?

So I have long stopped being a formal follower of Jainism. I have rejected its illogical dietary restrictions, its obsession with purification, its glorification of self-inflicted pain, and its guilty and muddled embrace of technology.

I refuse to let go of the belief that humans are highly intelligent, even if flawed, creatures who are capable of creating and experiencing great beauty and should have the freedom to do so without being encumbered by guilt and shame. I still hold that a faith that prescribes non-injury to all creatures must honor its believers and not advocate the self-inflicted violence that can deaden one’s enjoyment of life’s beauty and replace it righteous blindness.

I refuse to regard my body as a disgusting appendage to be dragged through my lifetime and tended to grudgingly until I am rewarded with release into bliss. To be born human is a gift to be celebrated by achieving one’s fullest potential and engaging in public service to make our world better. How wasteful, to finally earn the privilege of being incarnated human after several failed lifecycles, and then squandering that precious opportunity by retreating into the morbid execution of a community-sponsored death-wish!

Jainism’s innate goodness lingers in the corners of my mind in ways that never leaped out of its books or rituals. It is in my memories of the selfless austerity my maternal grandmother practised all her life, without ever being exhibitionistic or preachy. It is in the acceptance and sacrifice I see my parents practice constantly. It is in the remembrance I carry, like a pebble still clutched in a child’s hand, that personal responsibility, awareness and compassion must guide our thoughts and actions.

Although I have shunned Jainism’s myriad rules, I have kept parts of it that make sense to me and help me become a good person. I practice little austerities quietly, but think the world of garlic and occasionally wear silk. I try to consume less and be a caring world citizen. I do not abstain from my normal diet during Paryushan or pray more, but I observe its concluding ritual, which encourages the faithful to seek each other’s forgiveness for any slights or suffering they might have inflicted, knowingly or unintentionally.

I still say the Navkar mantra every day, a reflex lingering from my childhood programming that I find comforting. It is an umbilical cord that links me to the fountainhead of a faith that has not yet spoken to me.