Temple
worship.The Jaina are most courteous in permitting outsiders to witness the ritual of their temples, only asking that the spectators should remove their shoes. In the Digambara temples the idols are nude, and the eyes are cast down as a sign that the saint represented is lost to all worldly thought. The Śvetāmbara, like the Digambara, have images of the Tīrthaṅkara sitting in meditation in the Kāusagga position with legs crossed and hands in the lap, but unlike the Digambara their idols are given loin-cloths, have staring glass eyes looking straight in front of them, and are adorned with necklaces, girdles and bracelets of gold. The writer has elsewhere fully described the worship in the temples:[1] here it may suffice to give only a short summary.
Digam-
bara
worship.The officiant in a Digambara temple must himself be a Jaina (though this is not the rule among the Śvetāmbara), and he will never eat any of the offering made to the idol. In the course of the morning worship he washes the idol (Jaḷa pūjā) and dries it, being most careful that no drop of water falls to the ground, marks it with three auspicious marks of yellow powder (Ċandana pūjā), and offers rice (Akṣata pūjā) and dried (not fresh) fruit (Naivedya pūjā).
In the evening the worship consists of Āratī pūjā, when a five-fold lamp is solemnly waved from left to right for a few minutes in front of the idol.
Śvetām-
bara
worship.The strange part of Śvetāmbara worship is that, if no Jaina be present, it can be performed by a non-Jaina, and the writer has at various times seen paid officiants who were Brāhmans, gardeners, or farmers by caste performing the ritual.
If, however, a devout Jaina be present, he will, after bathing and changing his clothes to the two pieces of cloth he keeps for
- ↑ Notes on Modern Jainism, pp. 86 ff.
