It was pointed out in the introduction how profoundly some Indians believe that the result of action (karma) ties men to the cycle of rebirth, and that if, through the cessation of life, action and its resultant karma could be ended, so much the less would be the danger of rebirth. This tenet naturally encouraged belief in suicide as a form of prudential insurance! Amongst the recorded deaths by suicide are those of Mahāvīra’s parents, who, according to the Śvetāmbara belief, died of voluntary starvation: ‘on a bed of kuśa grass they rejected all food, and their bodies dried up by the last mortification of the flesh which is to end in death.’[1] At their death Mahāvīra, who was by now approaching his thirtieth year, felt free to become an ascetic, and asked his elder brother’s permission to renounce the world; the brother consented, only stipulating that Mahāvīra should do nothing in the matter for a year, lest people should think they had quarrelled.
The Digambara accounts differ widely from this. According to them, even when only a child of eight, Mahāvīra took the twelve vows[2] which a Jaina layman may take, and that he always longed to renounce the world; other Digambara say that it was in his thirtieth year that, whilst meditating on his ‘self’, he determined to become a monk, realizing that he would only spend seventy-two years in this incarnation as Mahāvīra. At first his parents were opposed to the idea of their delicately nurtured child undergoing all the hardships that fall to the lot of a houseless mendicant, but at last they consented, and it was during their lifetime that Mahāvīra entered on the spiritual vocation, which in India, as in Europe, has so often proved a suitable career for younger sons.
Modern research would seem to favour the Śvetāmbara belief that Mahāvīra had married, but this the Digambara strenuously deny, for an ascetic who has never married
