Word: jainists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nearly 30 years a Jainist muni, or monk, Chitrabhanu was a spiritual leader for nearly four million Jainists in India. Forsaking his monastic vows, he broke a 2500-year-old tradition by leaving India in 1970 to attend spiritual summit conferences in Geneva and in 1971 at the Divinity School. Faced with fast-paced technologically-oriented lives, Westerners were thirsting for the rest and calmness of the East, Chitrabhanu says: "If they take the time to understand the inside life as they have understood the phenomena of the outside, it will be a blessing for mankind." It is just this...
Chitrabhanu's Jainist philosophy stresses non-violence of actions, speech and thought; relativity in thinking, because truth is multi-faceted; non-acquisition, or avoiding material and emotional possessiveness; and karma, the law of deeds, meaning that each person is responsible for his own past thoughts and deeds and that everyone can shape his future with positive thought and action. Jainists are strict vegetarians because of their devotion to non-violence. As a monk, Chitrabhanu neither wore leather shoes nor rode on any vehicle or animal, since he could have inadvertantly inflicted some damage...
...wealth could have saved them from death, he says, so he started searching for the meaning of life. After consulting many gurus, he found one who told him to rely on his own experience rather than solely on the words of others. At age 20 he became a Jainist monk, and spent the next five years almost entirely in silence to determine the meaning of life...