Bhagvan Mahavira: life and philosophy

By Acharya Mahaprajna

Two thousand five hundred years ago India was divided into several principal kingdoms of Magadh, Ang, Bang, Kaling, Vats, Avanti, North Koshal etc. Licchavi in Vaishali, Shakya in Kapilavastu and Mall in Kushinara and Pava were democracies. The people of these areas were governed by democracy. In the kingdom states the king was looked upon as a personification of god. In democracy the ruler was looked upon as just another man. Bhagvan Mahavira was the son of Siddhartha, the elected ruler of Vaishali. His mother's name was Trishala. Kshatriyakundgram was a small suburb in Vaishali. On this sacred land Bhagvan Mahavira was born. He was born on the 30th of March, 599 BC. There is very little information available on his childhood or his youth. When Mahavira turned twenty eight, his parents died. He expressed the desire to become a monk (shraman). His uncle Suparshav and his elder brother Nandivardhan requested him to stay home a little longer. Mahavira was too gentle and humble to turn down their request and yet his resolve could not accept the life of a householder. This internal conflict opened a new route. Perhaps it is at this time that he developed the following sutra:The one who has not given up his desires but has become a shraman is neither at home nor away from it. But having given up desires, one can stay at home and yet remain far away from it.
In the following two years that he stayed at home, Bhagvan Mahavir was at home and yet far away from it. In this time he practiced austerities for developing detachment to the human body.
He remained alone even in the midst of his family. The one who does not have attachment can live alone even in a group.
He specially practiced curbing the sense of taste. The one who has tasted the bliss that lies beyond the body has no problems in practicing indifference to the palate.
He was absorbed in silence and meditation. The one who does not need to express himself or herself in the outer world finds his speech becoming silent, thoughts zeroing down.
With the austerities practiced by him during these two years, the foundations to monkhood became stronger. The time period sought by his elders now came to an end. He felt that while it is possible to stay home and yet remain detached, this was not society's path. This was the path chosen by a few.
That which can fit into society is the act of giving up attachment/ desire and also giving up the home. The one who wishes well for everybody acts as would be conducive to building a harmonious society. Bhagvan Mahavira got permission to leave home and taking leave left Kshatriyakundgram and went to a garden outside the village. Amidst a gathering of people he was ordained and from thereon he set out on the lifelong path of equanimity.
Bhagvan Mahavira's penance began on the note of resolution:
From today I will not care about my body.
I will not protect it.
I will tolerate heat and cold.
I will withstand any problems.
I will not medicate myself during illness.
I will not be constrained by desires of hunger and thirst. I will win over sleep.'
Bhagvan Mahavira experienced: without harnessing fearlessness, equanimity cannot be attained and without harnessing the bodyless state, fear cannot be conquered.
The main source of all weaknesses in man, is fear.
The main source of supernatural powers in man is fearlessness.
Half the reasons for fear is attachment to body.
To give up this attachment, to be in a bodyless state it is mandatory to reach a state of fearlessness.
As Bhagvan Mahavira intensified his penance in the bodyless state, his feelings of non-violence (ahimsa), amity (maitri) and peace,(shantt), soared new heights.
Violence (himsa), arrogance ( vyr) and chaos (ashantt) are all in the body and are not present in the bodyless state. Mahavira was meditating in the ashram of Parshvanatha in Kannkhal.
The serpent called Chandakaushik raised its venomous hood. That did not have any impact on Bhagvan. It now coiled itself around the legs of Bhagvan and repeatedly started hissing at him.
From Bhagvan's eyes came a continuous flow of the nectar of amity that kept washing away the poison.
Non-violence had conquered violence. The serpent's anger subsided.The serpent took the oath of non-violence forever .
As Bhagvan Mahavira progressed in his penance he found the sun of equanimity shining with greater brilliance. Also glistening in that brilliance were
Truth (satya),
Non-stealth (achourya),
Celibacy (brahmacharya) and
Non-possessiveness (aparigraha). Mahavira was meditating. A milkman came. With him were his oxen. He left them to graze and went back home.
When he came back he found his oxen were not there. He became angry.
He ran hither and thither searching for them. Soon he reached the place where Mahavira was meditating.
He was stunned to find the oxen hovering around Mahavira.
The milkman thought, "Oh this monk wants to steal the oxen." This suspicion made him furious. Swirling a lasso in his hand he was about to attack Mahavira when Nandivardhan came on the scene. He assuaged the milkman. Nandivardhan wanted to make some arrangements for Mahavira's security.
Mahavira did not accept that:The one who feels insecure cannot tread the path of spirituality.The one who treads the path of spirituality feels forever secure.I need no security
. Mahavira was standing in the posture of meditation.
Some young maidens came to lure him. Mahavira did not pay any attention to them.
They tried all their tricks to attract him, but not even an atom of the energy that was rising towards his psychic kendra (chaitanya-kendra), moved towards the kam kendra.
Bhagvan's meditation went on undisturbed.
The young maidens went back as they had come.

The place intrigue

By Kedar Nath Pandey

The thing about palaces and palace politics, as many of its practitioner in New Delhi would attest if only grudgingly, is that they are one thing from outside, quite another from within. Palaces, in order to be called palaces, must appear invincible; inside, they are the most insecure of places, forever occupied with the business of keeping the palace a palace, forever troubled with intimations of being undone (Any wonder, then, that intrigue is to palace corridors what bloods is to body?).
The other thing about palaces and palace politics, again, as many of its practitioners in New Delhi would attest, is that there are thrones and the powers behind it that run the throne. And as long as the throne is in place, there is nothing quite as powerful as the power behind it. But when the throne is gone, there is nothing quite as powerless as the power behind it. Every construct of power has its chink; for powers behind the throne, that chink lies in the throne itself. Once the throne is gone, the power behind it must, rather quickly and helplessly, lose its reasons and relevance. Sonia Gandhi is perhaps going to spend some time this year giving a thought or two on the nature of collapsing palaces and the fate of those who must go down with them. If she is not, she must. Of course, the projected replacement is the 38-year-old Rahul Gandhi as the Congress's Prime Ministerial candidate triggered from within the party.
Taking the lead, the veteran Congress leader and Union HRD minister, Mr. Arjun Singh, albeit to questions posed to him in this connection, favoured the proposal, saying there was "nothing wrong" in projecting Mr. Gandhi as the candidate for the country's top job. The Gandhi scion is currently the AICC general secretary in-charge of frontal organisations like his father the year before he was pitch-forked into assuming the PM's office. Rahul is also being packaged by the Congress as its "new mascot" and its "principal leader in the making".
The only major stumbling block for the Congress, however, is the fact that it is at the helm of the government, courtesy an alliance of about a dozen UPA allies. Despite being the single largest party, the Congress, with around 150 MPs, is still far short of achieving a simple majority of 272 on its own in 2009. If the party fares similarly, forcing it to depend on many smaller parties to take a shot at government formation, it will have to consider whether the stage is suitable for the young, inexperienced Rahul to take the plunge into the PM's office. What has come as music to the Congress's ears is the latest statement by Mr. Praful Patel, Mr. Pawar's close associate, that the NCP is ready to support Mrs. Gandhi or Rahul as the Prime Minister, if the UPA has the numbers after the next polls as, it would then be the Congress's internal call whom it chooses for the post.
Will the Congress navigate through the electoral turbulence in six states this year and in 2009 with finesse to have the magical figure of majority in parliament? The Congress party has lost power in major states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and shortly elections are to be held in Karnataka, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh which account for 243 seats in Lok Sabha. If the prevailing mood of the electorate persists, the Congress has little chance of improving its position in these states. The aam aadmi politics of the government has not worked as sky rocketing prices of essential commodities and vegetables has gone beyond the reach of average household.
There is a perceptible change in the mind of the electorate that it is a party of the rich and privileged. The rampant corruption at political level has tarnished the image of the party. The caste configuration among the Hindus and the desertion of the minority community have added to the decline of the party, which earlier represented a social coalition with a slant towards the broad base of India's plural society. The present agenda with which the Congress will face the electorate represents a radical switch in relation to social base and ideological spectrum.
It is not as if the ruling party's policies per se have become unpopular. There is nothing like what happened during the Emergency. Yet, in terms of the consequences of the policies, it is probably worse. It is not the policies that people are voting against-much of the lingo of those policies such as fiscal deficit, export promotion; massive increase in foreign exchange holdings and improved trade flows is unintelligible to them. What they will be voting against are two things: the perpetuation and worsening of poverty and economic polarization (the corrupt rich-versus-the oppressed poor) and the Congress that is thought to be responsible for it all.
Never before was the Congress and what it stood for so discredited, never before has it been so deeply divided. It is in many ways a dramatic reversal: usually we all harp on the infighting in the opposition; now it is much more so in the Congress, and the opposition, if anything, despite immediate problems in Maharashtra and elsewhere, is trying to desperately work out new alignments and efforts at "unity" towards which the people at large will be pushing it (as it has done in recent past) and so are various regions and communities within those regions.
Nor is it a question of simply holding regions and communities of a plural society together-federally and socially. It is not just a matter of vertical integration. It is also disintegration of the national framework of institutions and the democratic, parliamentary and party systems on which they were based. All the time during the period of UPA rule the doors have been flung open to outsiders, the internal structures were subjected to corrosion, endemic corruption and cynical mismanagement. The greater the attempt to integrate into the global framework of finance, trade and technology, the greater the tendency towards internal disintegration, moving further and further away from the roots of civil society, from the federal structure, from the diversity of castes, classes and communities, from the "people" at large.
Out of this very process of disintegration of the erstwhile order may well emerge a new structure of both politics and basic institutions? In reality two processes have been going on simultaneously during the last three-and-half years and more-integration with the global framework (essentially a techno-economic phenomenon) and massive stirrings of both consciousness and action from the bottom up (essentially a socio-political phenomenon).
The former inevitably led to shrinkage of the social base of the Congress party and the governing structure found itself unable to handle the new stirrings of the hitherto excluded and marginalised sections. Similarly the former led to a reduction in importance of the regions and the federal structure and was consequently unable to face the growing regional upsurges and the assertion of the state-level politicians.
The more the Congress and the Central government under it wish to monopolise the advantage of the new economic policies, the more it is likely to strengthen the regional bosses both within the party and outside, just as the more it emphasises the "macro" dimensions of development the more it will loose out to the "micro" assertions of civil society in a variety of social and regional settings.
All of this, for which the new economic policies are solely responsible, is likely to provide a watershed in the growth of the polity, a watershed that coincides with the end of the Congress era in Indian politics. To what extent this will produce a truly more democratic and federal structure will depend on the non-Congress parties, the diverse social movements and the capacity of the people themselves to give structure to their strivings and their new consciousness of rights.
The truly determining factor that had for long been neglected, both by political activists and by social scientists, has already been and is increasingly going to be the social basis of civil society. This is what has accounted for the debacle in the north, especially in UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
The effort to meet all these challenges (social, regional and political) by talking about giving the new policies a "human face" is both ironic and ridiculous. If it is to be given a human face now what was it so far? Somehow this is a line being brandied about both in the Congress and in the print media. But it is not likely to be taken seriously by the people. The point really is that we are moving into a season of increasing disenchantment with the establishment and their growing voices of protest and anger against an inhuman establishment.
The next big defeat for the Congress will alter equations between the Nehru-Gandhis and the Congress very fundamentally because Sonia Gandhi has decided-for her many, and probably good, reasons-only to get from the party and not give it, whatever it is that she can. If powers behind thrones decide to remain just that, they must fade when the throne does. In the circumstances the future for the Congress party looks bleak whether it projects Rahul Gandhi as the future Prime Minister of the country. INAV