Years of silence

At a Glance

• Central figures: Vardhamana Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara of Jain tradition; his elder brother Nandivardhana; various villagers and ascetics who encountered him during his wandering years.
• Setting: Northeast India - Kundagrama, the forests and villages of Bihar and Bengal - in the sixth century BCE, during the twelve and a half years of Mahavira’s spiritual practice before his attainment of Kevala Jnana.
• The turn: After renouncing his household life at age thirty, Vardhamana took a vow of complete silence and endured more than twelve years of exposure, hunger, insect bites, beatings, and isolation without speaking a single word or seeking any comfort.
• The outcome: At the age of forty-two, meditating on the bank of the river Rijupalika near the village of Jrimbhikagrama, Vardhamana destroyed the last residue of karma binding his soul and attained omniscience.
• The legacy: Mahavira’s years of silence established the model for Jain monastic austerity - the practice of mauna (silence), tapas (ascetic heat), and radical non-possession that defines Jain renunciation to the present day.

Vardhamana pulled his hair out in five fistfuls. He stood in the hall at Kundagrama, thirty years old, and he pulled the hair from his scalp the way a farmer pulls weeds - deliberately, in clumps, roots and all. His brother Nandivardhana watched. The court watched. No one stopped him. He had asked Nandivardhana’s permission, and Nandivardhana, weeping, had given it.

He removed his ornaments. He removed his clothing. He walked out of the palace wearing a single garment given to him by a deva - or by his own choice, depending on which account one follows - and within thirteen months he had discarded even that. He was naked. He would remain naked for the rest of his life. And he would not speak again for a very long time.

The First Months at Asthikagrama

The silence began almost immediately. Vardhamana wandered from Kundagrama into the countryside of what is now Bihar, walking south and east, eating only what was placed into his cupped hands, and only when he had not asked for it. He did not beg. He stood in one place with his hands open, and if someone filled them he ate. If no one did, he did not eat.

In the village of Asthikagrama, children threw stones at him. They did not understand what he was. A naked man standing motionless at the edge of a field, unspeaking, unblinking in the afternoon heat - they took him for a madman or a ghost. The stones cut his skin. He did not move. He did not cover the wounds.

Dogs bit his ankles. He did not kick them away.

Ants climbed his legs while he meditated and he held still, because to brush them off would be to harm them, and he had vowed ahimsa so completely that even the involuntary flinch of his body was something to be overcome. He trained himself out of flinching. It took months.

Naked Through Bengal

He walked into Bengal, where the winters are cold and the people were suspicious of wandering ascetics. They drove him from villages with sticks. They set dogs on him. In one place, according to the Jain biographical texts, a cowherd drove a nail into his ear while he sat in meditation, and Vardhamana did not cry out.

He ate rarely. Weeks passed between meals. When he did eat, the food was plain - rice, lentils, whatever a householder might spare for a silent naked stranger standing at the road’s edge. He accepted food only under strict conditions he had set for himself. If a woman was crying when she offered food, he would not take it. If the vessel was chipped, he would not take it. If someone spoke to him while offering, he would not take it. The conditions varied with each fast he undertook, and some of the conditions were so narrow that months went by without any being met.

His body thinned. His ribs showed. His skin darkened and roughened from sun and wind and cold. He did not shelter inside buildings. He slept - when he slept - on the bare ground, or standing upright. The Digambara tradition holds that he never lay down during the entire twelve and a half years.

Chandkaushik

Near the town of Shvetambika, a great serpent named Chandkaushik lived in an abandoned garden. The snake was venomous and furious. It had killed travelers. Local people avoided the entire road.

Vardhamana walked directly into the garden and sat down to meditate.

Chandkaushik struck. The snake bit his foot. Vardhamana did not move. The accounts say that instead of blood, milk flowed from the wound - but whether or not one credits that detail, the essential fact is simpler. He did not strike back. He did not flee. He sat with the snake coiled at his feet, and the force of his stillness was such that Chandkaushik eventually uncoiled and withdrew.

The snake, the texts say, underwent a change. It stopped killing. It lay in the garden and fasted, its venom spent, its fury burned out by proximity to a man who would not react to it. Jain tradition holds that Chandkaushik achieved a better rebirth.

Vardhamana stood and walked on. He still had not spoken.

The Silence Itself

What does silence mean for twelve years? Not the comfortable silence of a library. Not the chosen quiet of a morning before others wake. This was a silence maintained through beatings, through starvation, through the nail in the ear, through children’s mockery and dogs’ teeth and the frozen ground of Bengal in January. It was a silence maintained while naked, while owning nothing, while depending entirely on the random charity of strangers who often refused him or attacked him.

He was not performing. There was no audience. Months passed in forests where no one saw him at all. He meditated in abandoned buildings, in cremation grounds, under trees, standing in fields while rain fell. The silence was not for anyone’s benefit. It was the practice itself - the slow, grinding dissolution of every attachment between his soul and the accumulated karma that Jain teaching says clings to every living being like dust to a wet cloth.

Each act of endurance burned a layer of that karma away. Each fast, each night in the cold, each blow absorbed without reaction. The body was the furnace. The silence was the fire.

Rijupalika

In the thirteenth year, near the village of Jrimbhikagrama, Vardhamana sat down on the northern bank of the river Rijupalika beneath a shala tree. He sat in the godohika posture - squatting, the way a milkmaid sits - and he had been fasting for two and a half days without water.

On the tenth day of the bright half of the month of Vaishakha, in the early hours before dawn, the last particle of karma detached from his soul. The texts call it Kevala Jnana - omniscience, absolute knowledge, the state in which all things in all times are known simultaneously.

He was forty-two years old.

He rose. He spoke. After more than twelve years, Vardhamana Mahavira - the Great Hero, the Jina, the Victor - opened his mouth and began to teach. His first sermon was delivered in a samavasarana, the great circular preaching hall that appeared wherever he spoke, with three concentric rings of listeners: gods, humans, and animals, all hearing the teaching in their own languages.

He would teach for thirty years more. But the silence came first. Everything he said afterward was shaped by what he had endured while saying nothing.