Paryushan: Austerity and Increase in Counterpoint

Abstract

Abstract At many points in our consideration of Jain religious self-fashioning, we have seen the affirmation of worldly life and good fortune interwoven with asceticism and world-renunciation. We saw this in fasting, where the very substances which are renounced in ascetic practice are displayed and consumed, in celebration of the feat of not consuming them. In the Paryushan festival asceticism and auspiciousness are again combined, and here each occurs in such a heightened form that their co-occurrence presents itself as an almost surreal aesthetic contrast.1 This occurs in the Jains’ own celebrations, but to see its full force, we need to notice that the Jains also participate in a Hindu festival which is celebrated at the same time. As I described in Chapter 5, you can be a Jain without ceasing to be, in the broad sense, a Hindu; and this is essential, I think, to understanding how lay Jain religious identity works. But this is not an easy syncretism, and nor does it quite capture what is going on to say that certain Jain practices have a higher status than do ‘popular’ Hindu ones. In so far as Jainism is conceived as an ascetic renunciation of worldly life, it needs a conception and experience of what that worldly life is. And in so far as lay Jains are partial, conditional, imperfect, or intermittent practitioners of ascetic renunciation—in so far that is, as they are only occasionally ‘real Jains’—that worldly life is more than just a rhetorical background for them.