Loot

“Those saddhus would sometimes come to Dewas and bless the Palace, and demand a hundred rupees each. Malarao would speak them as fair as he could and give each of them one rupee. They then cursed the Palace and returned to Ujjain.”
E M Forster, The Hill of Devi


A puzzle had remained from the Sravana Belgola some years ago. Jains, or at least the monks, do without everything except air. Sometimes they just stand in the forest, naked, for years on end. Less ascetic Jains, those who are not monks, tend to be rich. This is because it is a central tenet of Jainism that no living thing should be hurt; they wear cloths over their mouths to prevent tiny insects wandering in and perishing. The prohibition on hurting anything cuts out most occupations - abattoir work, warfare, construction, agriculture, fisheries. In fact the only thing a Jain can decently do is to go into trade or the financial sector, where you would be unlikely to crush or maim any living thing.
Great wealth aside, there is little to suggest acquisitiveness should be a Jain characteristic.
Jainism, like its more or less contemporary Buddhism, was not in its origins a religion. It was an atheistic philosophy of how people should live and die, running alongside the Vedic profusion of gods that was later to become Hinduism. Nonetheless temples were built, the Luna Vasahi on Mount Abu among them; around the year 1231, all marble. The sculptors were paid each day for marble shavings by weight in silver, and for marble dust by weight in gold. It took fifteen hundred craftsmen twenty one years, or some combination of those numbers, to complete one of the most fractal buildings in the world. In places the marble is so thin it is slightly translucent. There is a monolithic dome carved as diminishing pendant coronae of lotus petals. Every surface of pillar, lintel and arch is the marble equivalent of filigree. It, the temple and its detail, are mesmerising.
In the Sravana Belgola those years ago there were big signs everywhere saying Only Make Donations at the Door. Our priestly guide spend an inordinate time distinguishing between each of the fifty two thirtankaras in their niches. Then, in the particularly deep shadow of a pillar, he said, “OK, you can give me the cash now.” In the kind of panic you might have when doing your first street drug transaction I handed over whatever we were going to donate to the temple. The rest of the guided tour passed quickly. Then by the door the same priest sat cross legged and invited us too to be seated, before asking what money we were going to reneder unto God. “B-b-but-but...” I said and on the spot developed a steely intransigence in the face of exotic men of religion demanding gifts which I have held on to ever since. And I mused on how this unembarrassed personal greed squared with standing in the forest so the vines grew round one’s legs and trunk, taking nothing from the world but air.
Brahma is likewise free from desire for transient matter, so there are hardly any Brahma temples in India. Pushkar is one of the exceptions. The Brahma temple there is very small, very old and as we were there for the main religious festival of the year, very crowded. The previous night we had walked through the town along the narrow busy streets. Young men approach, press rose petals into your hand, tell you you must throw them into the water. We prevaricated but soon we found ourselves, J and me, down on a ghat, looking over the spangled lake, clutching our rose petals damply while a young Brahmin in jeans led us in prayer and incantation. First we prayed for our family and friends, then we did a bit of hari Krishna ’n’ Rama-ing (I hadn’t realised Hindus were responsible for this, I thought it was anorexic people with bad dress sense and possible mental health issues), then our prayers homed in more specifically on the Brahmins of Pushkar, of which it turned out there were some two thousand, all dependent for their livelihood on nothing but generous and loving donations from such good people as ourselves. It turned out that virtuous and generous people like ourselves gave surprising amounts, a sum of a million rupees was mentioned, though in the end our young spiritual guide said twenty quid would be sufficient. At this point I noticed my sister who had been praying and incantating much more brusquely than we, a little removed to our right, now stalking up the ghat, looking severe. Enough. I gave the man of religion twenty rupees. He was angry, indignant, insulted. I was haughty and authoritative. That or nothing. The man of religion flounced up the steps cursing. I gave the lad who was protecting our shoes ten rupees. He was angry, indignant, insulted too, even more theatrically than the Brahmin. He gave the note back. I said that or nothing. He tried to return it once again. It dropped in the dust. Where maybe it still lies.
Up in the street I asked my sister what she’d given her guru. She said, “five rupees, and he was lucky.” But she had the authority of the wedding mangalasutra round her neck.
Acquisitiveness is the Brahmin's right. And the reputation of Brahmins spherical with gluttony is no cause for shame. The gods themselves are worldly creatures. Outside Pushkar on two adjacent conical hills are two other temples, one to the wife of Brahma, Savitri. She is estranged from the godhead because a long time ago, when she was away, Brahma invited a tribal girl to take his consort’s place in an important ceremony. In the year 2002 the priests of the Savitri temple brought a case in the regional court against the priests of the Brahma temple. Their argument was that Savitri had been forced to divorce Brahma because of his betrayal, and thus had been forced to decamp to a temple some distance from the town and its lake (created by Brahma when he dropped lotus petals on the earth), decamp to a temple what is more on top of a steep and rocky hill which people were disinclined to walk up; so no money could be made from worshippers, and the goddess was without financial support; and therefore the god Brahma, in the form of his temple managers, owed Savitri, in the form of her temple managers, alimony. Quite a lot of it. Brahma’s infidelity, albeit only a ritual one, had occurred a couple of millennia back, and the question of backdating the payments is germane. The legal arguments are complex, the implications of victory for the Savitri faction incalculable. The case drags on - maybe for another two thousand years.
At Mount Abu we had a charismatic guide, a young man with compelling eyes who was already going places in local politics, a champion of the poor. He spoke fluently about the Jain religion, and at last answered the question of the venality of priests in Jain temples. Jainism, he said, is not in that sense a religion, and they don’t have priests at all. The guys who look after Jain temples and stash the loot are, of course, Hindu Brahmins.
J said she’d also asked the guide about the standing in the forest not eating for a year thing. He’d looked at her for a few seconds, raised an eyebrow a millimetre, and looked away.