creatures, furniture and plenishing. Beyond this limit I will regard nothing as my own possession. As long as I live I will not myself regard in body, mind, or speech things beyond these as my own.…[The five Atiċāra are] transgressing the limit fixed in houses and fields, silver and gold, coins and grain, two-footed or four-footed creatures, furniture and plenishing.'
The man who takes this vow promises that he will never allow himself to retain more than a certain fixed quantity of houses and fields, gold and silver, cash and corn, servants and cattle, furniture and plenishing. The vow is broken by passing beyond the self-prescribed limits by means of such devices as banking the superfluous money in a daughter's name, or substituting four big houses for the four small houses originally agreed on. As a proof of how this vow is observed the Jaina are fond of quoting the recent case of a Mr. Popata Amaraċanda of Cambay, who when quite a poor man had promised that he would never possess more than 95,000 rupees. He became a very successful man of business, but as soon as he had made the prescribed number of rupees, he gave to the building of temples or the founding of animal hospitals all the extra money he made.
These five vows are called the five Anuvrata, and they resemble in their content, as we shall see, the five great vows a monk takes. If a layman keeps all five Anuvrata and has also abandoned the use of intoxicants, animal food, and honey,[1] he possesses the eight primary qualities of a layman and is rightly called a Śrāvaka.
The three
Guṇavrata. The first five vows are followed by three Guṇavrata, which 'help' the keeping of the first five vows.
- ↑ Honey seems to the Jaina to resemble hiṁsā, the depriving a jīva of his house, and, moreover, by the brutal way in which honey is gathered in India by burning a torch under the comb, the bees and their eggs are destroyed. Jaina are therefore most interested to learn that Europeans actually build houses for bees in which the arrangements are so efficient that the eggs and bees are not injured when the honey is removed, and also that sufficient food is left to the bees. So strongly do the Indian villagers feel about their own destructive way of taking honey, that they have a proverb: 'The sin incurred in destroying one honey-comb is as great as that accumulated by destroying twelve villages.'
