श्रमण
The mendicant path
Monks and nuns who own almost nothing, walk everywhere, beg their food, and stop for the monsoon — the discipline the lay community is organised around supporting.
Jain mendicants walk. They do not use vehicles, on the reading that travel by machine causes harm they would be responsible for, and the consequence is that a Jain monastic order moves at walking pace across a subcontinent. They beg their food, taking a little from several households so that no household is burdened and no food is prepared for them specially; food cooked for a mendicant is food whose harm they caused.
The rainy season stops the walking. For four months the order settles in one place — chaturmas — because the monsoon brings out life that constant travel would crush. That settled period is when the lay community has sustained access to teaching, which is why the concentrated observances of the year, Paryushana and Das Lakshana, fall inside it.
The five vows are taken absolutely, and to them are added specific disciplines: care in walking, speaking, accepting food, handling objects and disposing of waste, each of which is a rule about not harming what one has not noticed. The mouth-cloth and the soft broom that appear in images are instruments of the same care.
Sallekhana is the vow that draws the most outside attention and is the most often misdescribed. It is a fast to death, undertaken only when death is already inevitable and near, with the consent of a teacher, and it must be undertaken without passion or the desire for it to be over — conditions that distinguish it in the tradition’s own terms from suicide, which it condemns. Its legality in India has been litigated; the Rajasthan High Court held against it in 2015 and the Supreme Court stayed that ruling the same year.
None of this is a separate world from lay life. The lay community feeds the order, and the order teaches the lay community, and the two vow structures are the same five vows at different depths. A Jain city is arranged around that exchange.
Digambara and Svetambara monastic orders differ in possessions and in dress, and the Svetambara Sthanakvasi and Terapanthi orders differ again in rejecting image worship. Nuns outnumber monks substantially in the Svetambara orders, and the Digambara tradition does not admit women to the fully unclothed advanced stage, which is the practical face of its position on liberation.