Absent Lord: The Cosmos

We have seen that the text of Parsvanath's five-kalyanakpuja places great emphasis on the wider transmigratory context of Parsvanath's Tirthankarhood - his journey through different states of existence in different regions of the universe. This is one of the most obvious facts about the rite: that it situates itself in relation to a cosmos far wider than the place and time of Parsvanath's last birth. Within the framework of the rite, it is his cosmic situation that renders his final lifetime intelligible. A certain vision of the cosmos is therefore an element in the ritual culture within which the rite occurs. This is a vision in which the radical asceticism represented by the Tirthankar - asceticism that culminates in his complete disappearance from the world of acts and consequences - is a reasonable response to existence.

The key to this vision is magnitude. If we supplement the rite's text with other sources, as I now propose to do, we discover that the Jain cosmos is a place of very large numbers. It is a stupendous vision in which, some would say, we see the numerical and metrical imagination run riot. The point of the vision, however, is not simply metrical; rather, its purpose is to illustrate the difficulty of attaining liberation. The cosmos, enormous in extent, swarms with forms of life, most of which are highly vulnerable to inadvertant or deliberate violence. Within this vast system, the opportunity to acquire a human body, which is the only body in which liberation is possible, is vanishingly small. The numbers in question are deployed in three domains: space, time, and biology.^[1]