Beyond the diyas: Pujya Gurudevshri Rakeshji on the inner lamp of Jain Diwali

We light diyas every year without thinking much about them. Through the talks of Pujya Gurudevshri Rakeshji, we can make out that there are actually three lamps that are spoken about in the stories of Diwali.

Count the diyas on your balcony this Diwali and you will probably lose track somewhere past twenty. Delving deep into Pujya Gurudevshri Rakeshji, founder of Shrimad Rajchandra Mission Dharampur (SRMD)’s teachings, you will count to three.

From those three lamps, one you can see, one you inherit & one you have to light yourself.

The lamp on the doorstep

The first is the one we all know. Diwali's lamps are older than any single story. The people of Ayodhya, the Ramayana tells us, lit the banks of the Sarayu to welcome Ram home. In the Jain tradition, the festival took on another meaning on the new-moon night when Bhagwan Mahavir, the 24th Tirthankara, attained Nirvana. The kings who heard the news lit lamps because, as the old account puts it, the light of their lives had gone out.

There is no quarrel with the outer lamp. But we should remember what it is for. A lamp lit in memory of a liberated soul is a reminder of where the spiritual road leads. Lit out of habit, it is just a nice light.

The lamp that is handed on

The second lamp is hidden in the word itself. Deepavali means a row of lamps, and Gurudevshri points out how such a row gets made. You light one lamp from another.

That, is how spiritual knowledge has survived. When Bhagwan Mahavir passed, his teaching went to his chief disciples, the Gandhars, who had sat through his discourses for thirty years. From Gautam Swami it passed to Sudharmaswami, then to Jambuswami, and on through the scholar-saints and Acharyas who followed. Jains call this living tradition Jinshasan.

The lamp inside

The third lamp is the one nobody else can see, and it is the one he cares about most.

Jain philosophy calls it Bhedjnan, the ability to tell the Self apart from everything that is not the Self. We tend to think we are our bodies, our moods, our thoughts, our things. All of those change. The soul, the part of us that is aware of all that change, doesn't. Gurudevshri calls the moment that becomes clear, the moment of self-realisation as the lighting of the Atma Deepak, the lamp of the Soul.

A diya burns for a night. The inner lamp, once it catches, changes how you see everything after.

A Spiritual Celebration during Diwali

At the Mission's international headquarters in Dharampur, in South Gujarat, the Diwali Shibir from 7 to 10 November is where these ideas get some practice. Gurudevshri will speaks on Natak Samaysaar, the 17th-century Jain spiritual text. There is Bhakti for Bhagwan Mahavir's Nirvan Kalyanak and a puja on Shrimad Rajchandraji’s composition on the Hindu New Year.

Gurudevshri has given more than 16,000 hours of discourses over the years, across more than 30 scriptures from different faiths. His definition of religion is short: "Dharma should touch your whole being, not just your tongue." The three lamps are one way of letting Diwali do the same.