CHAPTER 11 The Sūrimantra and the Tantricization of Jain Image Consecration

Ellen Gough1

For eight days in December of 2008, hundreds of Jains from both image- worshiping sects of Jainism, Digambara and Śvetāmbara, gathered at the Jain Center of Greater Phoenix in Arizona, U.S.A., to celebrate the installation of twenty-six Jain temple images (mūrti, bimba, pratimā, etc.).2 During these eight days of celebration, both Digambara and Śvetāmbara icons were installed (pratiṣṭhita) in the temple at the Center, but only the Digambara mūrtis were consecrated, or instilled with the energy of the Jina.3 Because the Śvetāmbara practitioners at the Center believe that only a fully initiated monk has the power to transform a temple image into the presence of the Jina, they had ordered the consecration of their mūrtis—the eye-opening ceremony (añjanaśalākā)—to be performed by a monk in Mumbai before the icons were flown to the United States. Monks have taken a vow to only travel by foot, so they could not attend the ceremony themselves. Many of the Digambaras at the Center, however, are followers of a new branch of Jainism founded in the second half of the

1 Fieldwork for this essay was undertaken from January to October 2013 in Hastinapur, Jaipur, Aligarh, Ahmedabad, Surat and Mumbai under the auspices of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant. I thank Phyllis Granoff for comments on an earlier version of this paper. 2 For an overview of this ceremony, see ‘Phoenix Pratishtha Mahotsav: A Jain Temple Rises in Valley of Sun,’ Jain Digest: A Publication by the Federation of Jain Association in North America 28/1 (Winter 2009), 11–12. Details not included in this article come from a telephone conver- sation with a participant in the festival, Dr. Kirit Gosalia, on 27 September, 2012. I thank him for his help in the research for this essay. 3 John E. Cort (2006) has discussed the theological problem of the Jain consecration ceremony, which explicitly calls the Jina, a liberated soul completely detached from the material world, into a Jain temple icon. While I recognize that many Jains consider Jina icons simply as sym- bols, the mantras used in the pratiṣṭhā ceremony explicitly call the Jina into the icon, and lay- people and mendicants repeatedly told me the icon either ‘becomes’ the Jina (bimb bhagvān ban jātā hai) or embodies some of the energies of the Jina that remain in the world after its liberation. Thus, for the purpose of this essay, I will assume that the pratiṣṭhā ceremony in some way transforms an icon into the physical presence of the Jina.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004337183_012 266 Gough twentieth century, the Kānjī Svāmī Panth, which has rejected the need for mendicancy, advocating for a lay path to liberation.4 Because Kānjī Panthīs do not require a mendicant to consecrate images, they could witness for them- selves the full image consecration ceremony. To undertake this ceremony, the Digambaras invited a ritual special- ist (pratiṣṭhācārya) from India to perform the pañcakalyāṇaka-pratiṣṭhā in which the icons to be consecrated are made to reenact the five (pañca) auspi- cious events (kalyāṇaka) in the life of the Jina: conception (garbha/cyavana), birth (janma), renunciation (dīkṣā/tapas), enlightenment/omniscience (kevalajñāna), and death/liberation (­mokṣa). Today, the pañcakalyāṇaka-pūjā is common to the pratiṣṭhā ceremonies of Śvetāmbaras and Digambaras, but, as we have seen, this Kānjī Svāmī version of the ceremony differs from other Jain varieties in that the main officiant of this pūjā is not a monk, but a layperson. There is, however, one component of the Kānjī Svāmī pratiṣṭhā ceremony in which these lay ritual specialists are required to imitate Digambara monks by removing their clothes. This rite occurs during the reenactment of the fourth kalyāṇaka, enlightenment (kevalajñāna). At this time, when the key moment of the enlivening ceremony, the eye-opening, occurs, a sheet is held around the mūrti that is to be consecrated, and behind the sheet, the pratiṣṭhācārya removes his clothes before whispering a potent invocation, the sūrimantra, into the ear of the mūrti. Within Jain temple ritual culture, this rite is absolutely exceptional. I know of no other ceremony in which a Jain layperson must remove all his clothes, and it highlights a tension in the Kānjī Svāmī tradition between respecting the ideal of full mendicancy and maintaining the belief that renunciation is not required for liberation. Indeed, these rites draw attention to questions that have been at the heart of Jainism since its formation: Who is a mendicant? Who is a layperson? And what actions define these roles?5 The following essay looks at the roots of this ritualized lay nudity, examin- ing the history and present-day uses of the Digambara sūrimantra. Of all the components of the image consecration ceremony, why do Kānjī Panthī ritual specialists only have to remove their clothes at the moment they recite the sūrimantra? My hypothesis is that this practice emerged because of medieval Digambaras’ adoption of tantric modes of image installation in which only

4 On the Kānjī Svāmī Panth, see Jain 1999: 101–117. 5 See Paul Dundas’s discussion of this issue in his article on Jain image consecration (Dundas 2009). The present study is indebted to this work as well as Dundas’s earlier study of the sūrimantra (Dundas 1998).