Paryushana

Paryushana is the most important festival of the Svetambara Jains, an eight-day period of intensified religious observance kept in the month of Bhadrapada (August-September). Its name suggests "abiding" or "coming together", and it falls during the monsoon, the season in which Jain mendicants, avoiding travel that would harm the abundant small life of the rains, settle in one place; the laity join them in a concentrated period of fasting, penance, study and self-examination. Degrees of fasting are undertaken, from partial abstention to complete fasts of the full eight days or longer, and the Kalpa Sutra, which recounts the lives of the Tirthankaras, above all Mahavira, is read publicly.

The festival draws the whole of Jain practice into focus: non-violence (ahimsa), restraint of the appetites, the confession of faults, and the deliberate turning of the mind from the outer world to the state of the soul. It is not a festival of celebration but of purification and discipline, the year's great occasion for taking stock of one's conduct against the demanding Jain ideal. Its keeping expresses the Jain conviction that the religious life is above all a work of self-conquest, and that a fixed season of heightened austerity is needed to renew that work.

Paryushana culminates on its final day, Samvatsari, the "annual" day, which is the spiritual heart of the whole festival and one of the most distinctive observances in any religion. On it, Jains perform Pratikramana, a detailed rite of confession and repentance in which they review their conduct over the past year and seek to atone for every fault, above all every act of harm (himsa) done to any living being, whether by deed, word or thought, and whether deliberate or unknowing.

Its outward and best-known form is the seeking of forgiveness from others: Jains approach family, friends and acquaintances, and increasingly send messages to the wider world, with the words "Micchami Dukkadam", "may all the wrong I have done be forgiven / may it be inconsequential", asking pardon for any hurt they have caused and freely granting it in return. The intention is to enter the new year with no unresolved enmity and a soul unburdened by unacknowledged harm, in keeping with the Jain teaching that non-violence extends to the smallest creature and that freedom from hostility toward any being is the mark of the purified. The universal, unconditional asking and granting of forgiveness makes Samvatsari a striking annual enactment of ahimsa turned inward and outward at once.