Spirituality Studies 83 Nishit Shah transgressions be forgiven”), and resolves to exercise greater restraint (Dundas 2002, 171–172). The practitioner experiences this not as ritual formality but as a direct confrontation with the karmic consequences of one’s own activity – an acknowledgment that harm, however minor, has material soteriological weight. In doctrinal terms, the practice reinforces saṃvara by strengthening restraint and contributes to nirjarā (Sa. “shedding”) by weakening passions that sustain existing karmic bonds. Ascetic discipline or “austerities” (Sa. tapas) represents the most intensive form of karmic regulation. Jain texts distinguish “external austerities” (Sa. bāhya tapas) – including “fasting” (Sa. upavāsa), dietary restriction, and physical endurance – from “internal austerities” (Sa. abhyantara tapas) such as meditation, scriptural study, and detachment from bodily attachment. Both forms are interpreted as accelerating the dissociation of bound karmic matter (Jaini 1979, 250–251). The practitioner does not seek divine pardon but undertakes self-purification grounded in the conviction that karmic particles are materially bound and therefore causally removable through individual effort alone. These practices find collective expression in Paryuṣaṇa (Sa. “annual festival of spiritual discipline”, or Daśa Lakṣaṇa in the Digambara tradition), an annual period of intensified spiritual discipline observed across Jain communities. During this period practitioners undertake fasting, increased meditation, scriptural study, and communal confession, culminating in the collective seeking of “forgiveness” (Sa. kṣamāpanā). The festival enacts the soteriological framework at a communal level: practitioners undertake karmic purification individually within a shared ritual context in which the doctrinal understanding of karma as material and removable is experienced collectively as ethical and spiritual urgency (Dundas 2002, 215–218). The Jain material model of karma thus underwrites a distinctive form of lived spirituality in which metaphysical realism intensifies ethical vigilance. Spiritual progress is conceived not as divine grace or mystical union but as the gradual removal of material obstruction through disciplined regulation of activity and passion. 5.6 Omniscience and Teaching: The Culmination of Karmic Dissociation The process of karmic purification described in the preceding sections culminates in “omniscience” (Sa. kevala-jñāna), attained when the four “destructive” (Sa. ghātiyā) karmas are completely destroyed (Jaini 1979, 266; Umāsvāti 1994, 253). Within the guṇa-paryāya framework, omniscience does not involve the acquisition of new cognitive powers but the complete removal of karmic obstruction: the soul’s intrinsic capacity for knowledge, always present in principle, manifests fully once the material conditions limiting it are eliminated (Singh 1974, 74). Kevala-jñāna is not identical with “liberation” (Sa. mokṣa), which requires the exhaustion of all remaining karmic matter, including the “non-destructive” (Sa. aghātiyā) karmas that sustain embodied existence (Dundas 2002, 104–105). A soul that has attained omniscience but remains embodied is termed a kevalin (Sa. “omniscient being”). In some cases, a kevalin functions as a tīrthaṅkara (Sa. “ford-maker”), whose karmic configuration includes specific body-determining karmas enabling a public teaching role (Jaini 1979, 258–260). The tīrthaṅkara teaches the path but does not walk it for others; clarifies karmic causality but does not intervene in its operation. Knowledge of the path may be transmitted, but liberation remains individually achieved through each soul’s application of the Ratnatraya (Jaini 1979, 42–43). The figure of the tīrthaṅkara therefore reinforces the non-theistic character of the Jain model: omniscience represents epistemic perfection, yet the removal of karmic bondage proceeds solely through the lawful dissociation of material karma.
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