Nine Lives Read Online Free PDF

or Tirthankaras – ford-makers – were a series of twenty-four human teachers who each discovered how to escape the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Through their heroic tapasya – bodily austerities – they gained omniscient and transcendent knowledge which revealed to them the nature of the reality of the great theatre of the universe, in every dimension. The most recent of those, according to the Jains, was the historical figure of Mahavira (599–529 BC ) – the Great Hero – a prince of Magadha, in modern Bihar, who renounced the world at the age of thirty to become a wandering thinker and ascetic.
    Mahavira elaborated to his followers a complex cosmological system that the Jains still expound 2,600 years later. Like other Indian faiths they believe in an immortal and indestructible soul, or jivan , and that the sum of one’s actions determines the nature of your future rebirth. However, the Jains diverge from Hindus and Buddhists in many ways. They reject the Hindu idea that the world was created or destroyed by omnipotent gods, and they mock the pretensions of the Brahmins, who believe that ritual purity and temple sacrifices can bring salvation. As a Jain monk explains to a group of hostile Brahmins in one of the most ancient Jain scriptures, the most important sacrifice for Jains is not some puja or ritual, but the sacrifice of one’s own body: ‘Austerity is my sacrifical fire,’ says the monk, ‘and my life is the place where the fire is kindled. Mental and physical effort are my ladle for the oblation, and my body is the dung fuel for the fire, my actions my firewood. I offer up an oblation praised by the wise seers consisting of my restraint, effort and calm.’
    Crucially, the Jains differ from both Hindus and Buddhists in their understanding of karma, which for other faiths means simply the fruit of your actions. Jains, however, conceive of karma as a fine material substance that physically attaches itself to the soul, polluting and obscuring its potential for bliss by weighing it down with pride, anger, delusion and greed, and so preventing it from reaching its ultimate destination at the summit of the universe. To gain final liberation, you must live life in a way that stops you accumulating more karma, while wiping clean the karma you have accumulated in previous lives. The only way to do this is to embrace an ascetic life and to follow the path of meditation and rigorous self-denial taught by the Tirthankaras . You must embrace a life of world renunciation, non-attachment and an extreme form of non-violence.
    The soul’s journey takes place in a universe conceived in a way that is different from any other faith. For Jains, the universe is shaped like a gigantic cosmic human body. Above the body is a canopy containing the liberated and perfected souls – siddhas – who, like the Tirthankaras , have escaped the cycle of rebirths. At the top of the body, level with the chest, is the celestial upper world, the blissful home of the gods.
    At waist level is the middle world, where human beings live in a series of concentric rings of land and ocean. The central landmass of this world – the continent of the Rose Apple Tree – is bounded by the mighty Himalayas, and set within ramparts of diamonds. At its very centre, the axis mundi , lies the divine sanctuary of the Jinas , Mount Meru, with its two suns and two moons, its parks and woods and its groves of wish-granting trees. Adjacent to this, but slightly to the south, lies the continent of Bharata or India. Here can be found the great princely capitals, surrounded by ornamental lakes blooming with lotus flowers .
    Below this disc lies the hell world of the Jains. Here souls who have committed great sins live as hell beings in a state of terrible heat, unquenchable thirst and endless pain, under the watch of a group of malignant and semi-divine jailers, the asuras , who are strongly opposed to the dharma of the Tirthankaras .
    In this world,