Embodied Ontologies

Abstract

Abstract Enough has been said, I hope, to indicate how much Jain religiosity consists of acts performed on and through the body, and to illustrate the armoury of ascetic practice Jainism has developed for its lay followers. All these forms of austerity—fasting, repentance, observing silence, and so on—are ways of using the body in order to effect some kind of inner transformation. I have suggested that this involves using the body as the soul’s ally against the mind, which is at once the most wayward and difficult to control of the sense organs, and, because it is where the passions arise, the front line, so to speak, in the defence against sin. The control of the mind enables you to act with the right bhav, which in the case of ascetic practice involves acting without any specific intention or meaning at all. Bhav comes to stand in this context not for symbolic or propositional meanings, but for the blotting out of desires, attachments, and purposes. I have tried to show how this way of thinking about ascetic practice, in which religious action comes to be seen as effective in so far as it is performed without desire, allows for an ambiguity, or plurality, in the purposes of ascetic practice so that ascetic renunciation and material good fortune may come to seem compossible. But this is not the only form that ascetic practice can take.