Das Lakshana Parva

Das Lakshana Parva, the "festival of ten characteristics", is the Digambara Jains' form of the great monsoon observance, corresponding to the Svetambaras' Paryushana and following immediately after it, kept over ten days in the month of Bhadrapada (August-September). Where the Svetambara festival lasts eight days, the Digambara runs ten, one for each of the ten cardinal virtues (dashalakshana dharma) of the soul, which are contemplated in turn: supreme forbearance, modesty, straightforwardness, purity/contentment, truthfulness, self-restraint, austerity, renunciation, non-attachment, and celibacy/chastity.

The days are given to fasting, worship, scriptural study and self-reflection, with the Tattvartha Sutra, the concise Digambara statement of Jain doctrine, often read; temples hold special worship, and many lay Jains undertake demanding fasts. The festival, like Paryushana, ends in a rite of forgiveness (Kshamavani), on which Jains ask pardon of all beings for any harm caused, with the same formula of Micchami Dukkadam. The two traditions thus keep, back to back, closely related festivals expressing the same core commitments, non-violence, austerity and the purification of the soul, differing chiefly in the number of days and in the Digambara focus on the enumerated ten virtues as the framework for the season's reflection.

The Tattvartha Sutra read during Das Lakshana Parva holds an unusual position in Jain textual history: composed by the philosopher Umasvati at some point in the early centuries of the common era, it is one of the very few Jain texts accepted as authoritative scripture by both the Digambara and Svetambara traditions despite the deep and long-standing doctrinal disagreements between them, including on the question, covered elsewhere in this atlas, of whether women can attain full liberation, a split that runs through most other areas of Jain textual authority and produces two largely separate canons.

Digambara and Svetambara editions of the Tattvartha Sutra do differ from each other in some details and commentary, and scholars continue to debate exactly how the text came to hold this unusual shared status when so much else in Jain literature developed along strictly sectarian lines, but its use during Das Lakshana Parva specifically, read and studied by Digambara Jains during the very days when the tradition's own distinctiveness from the Svetambara Paryushana is most on display, is itself a small but telling reminder that the two branches of Jainism share far more foundational material than their differing calendars and rival festivals might suggest to an outside observer.