The Dharma Sermon of Anantavirya Kevali

Ravana, enjoying pleasures like a king of the gods, was flying home to Lanka in his sun-bright vimana (aerial chariot) after worshipping at the Jain temples of Mount Sumeru, admiring on the way the seven regions and six great mountain ranges of the continent. Hearing a sweet, mighty sound and seeing the ten directions turn red, he asked his minister Maricha, who explained that Anantavirya Muni had just attained Kevala Jnana (omniscience) on this golden mountain and that the glow from the crowns of the gods coming to his Gandhakuti (sacred seat) was reddening the sky.

Overjoyed, Ravana, who held right faith, descended with his Vidyadharas, praised and bowed to the Kevali, and sat among the four classes of gods led by Indra, the humans and the animals. When a disciple asked about dharma and adharma, their fruits and the path to liberation, Anantavirya taught that the soul, whose mark is consciousness, has been bound by the eight karmas since beginningless time and turns like a potter's wheel through the four states of existence and 8.4 million kinds of birth, wasting even a rare human birth on the senses.

Those who kill parents, kin, children, the old or women, cause abortions, hunt, break beehives for honey, eat meat or honey, drink liquor, burn villages, slaughter cows, lie, steal or pursue others' wives fall into hell. There meat-eaters are fed their own flesh, drinkers must swallow molten lead, adulterers are made to embrace red-hot iron figures, and bodies hacked to pieces rejoin like mercury to suffer again.

The deceitful and sensual are born as animals and suffer binding, beating, heavy loads, cold, heat and hunger; the content and guileless gain human birth, with its endless contrasts of rich and poor, master and servant. Monks' vows, householders' vows, right faith, involuntary shedding of karma and even ignorant austerity lead to the heavens, yet differences of splendour there breed envy, so that in truth every state of existence is suffering.

On giving, he taught that a possessionless monk is the best recipient, aryikas (nuns), ailakas, kshullakas and kshullikas are middling, and a person of right faith without vows is the lowest, gifts to them leading to the best, middle and lowest Bhogabhumi (lands of enjoyment), while food, medicine and clothes given to the blind, lame, sick and hungry are compassionate giving. As well-water turns sweet in sugarcane and bitter in neem, and lake water becomes milk in a cow and poison in a snake, a gift to the worthy bears good fruit while a gift to proud, meat-eating false teachers is wasted.

Giving weapons, snares, animals or animal sacrifices is grave sin, and gifts of land cause harm, except land given for a Jina temple, which is a great gift. He urged the gift of fearlessness (abhaya dana) to every being from one-sensed to five-sensed, scriptures to the wise and food to all, and named seven great fields for wealth: Jina images, Jina temples, Jina worship, consecrations, pilgrimage to the Siddha-kshetras (sites of liberation), devotion to the fourfold order, and the gift of scripture.

Gods who keep weapons, women and ornaments are still bound by attachment, delusion (moha) being the root of every fault, and worshipping such false gods is like pressing sand for oil or one lame man carrying another abroad. The slight harm in building a Jina temple is like a drop of poison in a lake, and temple-builders enjoy heaven, are reborn as humans, keep the great vows and reach the supreme state.

The monk's dharma comprises the five great vows (total renunciation of violence, falsehood, theft, unchastity and possessions), the five samitis (carefulness in walking with eyes on four cubits of ground, in speech, in taking pure food, in handling implements and in excreting on lifeless ground), the three guptis (restraint of mind, speech and body), mastery of the five senses, and victory over the four passions: anger by forgiveness, pride by humility, deceit by straightforwardness and greed by contentment.

He described the twelve austerities: six external (fasting, eating less, conditional begging, giving up rich foods, dwelling in solitude, and bodily hardship such as meditating on peaks in summer, on riverbanks in winter and under trees in the rains) and six internal (confession and penance before the guru, reverence, service to sick, aged and young monks, the five kinds of scriptural study, abandoning the body in kayotsarga for a day up to a year, and meditation that rejects the sorrowful and cruel kinds for the virtuous and pure kinds).

Austerity brings riddhis (supernatural powers), among them the eight vikriya powers of anima, mahima, laghima, garima, prapti, prakamya, ishitva and vashitva; such monks could block the sun, flood or burn the world or rain jewels, yet stay utterly calm and use them only to protect the Dharma, since misuse would ruin their conduct, and even the dust of their feet cures disease. Those not liberated in that life become Indras anywhere from Saudharma heaven up to Sarvarthasiddhi, where there is no night, no season and no sleep, and gods are born full-grown on a birth couch as if waking from sleep, with fragrant bodies free of flesh and blood.

All happiness in the three worlds, including the ranks of Tirthankara, Chakravarti, Kamadeva and Baladeva, is the fruit of auspicious, conventional dharma, while Siddhahood is the fruit of the pure self: the Siddhas dwell at the summit of the universe, free of the eight karmas, with infinite knowledge, perception, bliss and energy, formless yet in human shape, never to return. Since the monk's dharma needs a human body, human birth is the best of births, as the lion is among beasts and Garuda among birds, and once lost it is as hard to regain as a gem dropped into the sea.

Still unsatisfied, Kumbhakarna asked for a fuller account, and the Kevali explained that dharma is twofold, the great vows of monks and the small vows (anuvratas) of householders. Twenty Tirthankaras, from Rishabhadeva to Munisuvrata, have appeared in this avasarpini (descending age) and four are yet to come; in this era of Munisuvrata many have become monks who rest wherever the sun sets, keep the twenty-eight root virtues, 8.4 million secondary virtues and eighteen thousand facets of chastity, know even the Sankhya, Buddhist, Mimamsa, Nyaya, Vaisheshika and Vedanta systems, and are liberated in that life or within three births.

The householder's twelve vows begin with five anuvratas: giving up harm to mobile beings, falsehood, theft and others' spouses, and limiting possessions. To praise contentment he told of Bhadra, a fruit-seller content to earn one dinar a day, who took a single coin from a purse lost on the road and returned it unasked to the king, its owner, and was honoured, while Kanchana, who seized the whole purse, was beaten and banished.

Then come three gunavratas (limiting travel in the ten directions, limiting it further to set regions, and renouncing purposeless harm such as evil thoughts, sinful advice, supplying weapons or poison, bad books and careless destruction of life) and four shikshavratas: samayika (equanimity meditation) thrice daily for two to six ghadis, proshadhopavasa (a sixteen-prahara fast on the two eighth and two fourteenth lunar days of each month), feeding uninvited monks, and limiting consumables, with sallekhana (a peaceful fast unto death) at life's end.

A follower of the Jina wholly gives up liquor, meat, honey, butter, udumbara fruits, eating at night, weevilled grain, unfiltered water and other men's wives or courtesans, and avoids the five flaws of right faith: doubt in the Jina's word, longing for pleasures, disgust at the sick, and praising or extolling followers of false and violent paths. A wrong believer, however fierce his austerity, cannot cross the ocean of rebirth, just as a stone slab cannot float and a traveller who does not know the road never arrives.

The wise should ever contemplate the twelve reflections (anupreksha): impermanence; that there is no refuge but the self and the five supreme beings; the misery of worldly existence; the soul's solitude; its separateness from all else; the impurity of the body; the influx of karma through wrong belief, non-restraint, passions, activity and carelessness; its stoppage through vows, samitis, guptis, the ten virtues, reflection, endurance of hardships and conduct; its shedding through austerity; the uncreated, eternal universe of six substances with the abode of the Siddhas at its summit; the rarity of pure awareness; and dharma as the soul's own nature and compassion.

When Kumbhakarna (Bhanukarna) asked about niyama (personal restraints), the Kevali said restraint and austerity are one: whoever gives up food for one muhurta (24 minutes) a day earns the fruit of one fast a month, two muhurtas two fasts and three muhurtas three. The daughter of an ignorant hermit, living on wild fruit in the forest, took a one-muhurta vow from a guru; by its power a king saw and married her, and she grew devout, took many vows and won a good destiny hereafter.

He condemned eating at night, when insects and hair fall unseen into the food: one should eat only from 48 minutes after sunrise to 48 minutes before sunset and give up all four kinds of food at night. Night-eaters are like rakshasas and wander for ages as pigs, dogs, donkeys and crows and in hell and nigoda (the lowest life-forms), while those who renounce it become chakravartis, kamadevas, baladevas, ministers and Indras, and such women become chief queens like Suprabha and Subhadra.

The warrior Sahasrabhata vowed to eat only after the monks' alms time; when a monk with riddhis took food at his house without obstruction, the five wonders, including a rain of jewels, appeared there, and by this merit he later became the famed, wealthy and learned merchant Kuberakanta, who finally took Jain diksha (initiation) and reached the supreme state. Harishena Chakravarti too won endless fortune through the same vow, and those who eat once a day or fast on the eighth and fourteenth lunar days rise to the heavens.

At the sermon's end some listeners became monks, some householders with vows, some noble animals took the small vows and many gods gained right faith. The monk Dharmaratha then urged Ravana to take some gem of a vow on this island of dharma; Ravana, attached to pleasure, reflected that his food was already pure and meatless, that he could not keep even one householder's vow, let alone the monk's vows, which are like drinking flames, tying the wind in cloth or lifting mountains, and that no woman anywhere could fail to be charmed by him.

Bowing to Anantavirya Kevali, with gods, humans and asuras as witnesses, Ravana declared his vow: he would never force himself upon any other man's woman who did not desire him, reasoning that such a woman, defiled by another's touch, held no attraction for him.

Kumbhakarna, steady as Sumeru, took refuge in the Arhats, Siddhas, Sadhus and the Kevali's dharma and vowed that each morning he would perform abhisheka (ritual bathing), worship and praise of the Jina and feed a monk with due rites before eating, never eating before the monks' alms time. Many others took vows too, the gods and Vidyadharas departed, and Ravana flew back to Lanka to live joyfully in his palace.