कुछ अनछुए प्रसंग

Summary

The text describes the spiritual experiments of Acharya Tulsi, a prominent Jain religious leader. His central goal was self-realization, with other objectives within that scope. He became a monk in 1925 and an Acharya in 1936. His early years as Acharya were spent in study and teaching, with significant experiments beginning in 1944. He believed health was essential for spiritual practice and that natural living and dietary restraint were necessary. His first dietary experiment involved giving up certain foods he had liked since childhood, such as ramkhichdi and papad, for a year, which eliminated his attraction to them. He also began practicing yoga postures. He adopted a rule of eating no more than seven or nine food items per meal, a practice that continued for years. He started fasting on the eighth and fourteenth days of the lunar fortnight in 1950, eventually doing four such single-meal days per month. He experimented with giving up all spices for a time to conquer taste. He conducted several week-long solitary retreats for personal practice and community reflection, including a month-long retreat in Hisar involving daily chanting, meditation, and a diet of only white foods like milk and bananas, followed by a three-day group fast. In 1975, he performed a month of continuous single daily meals. He adopted a practice of two monthly fasts from 1981 to 1983. He began a daily two-hour silence practice in 1950 to conserve energy. Inspired by reading about the editing of Buddhist texts, he initiated the editing of Jain Agamas in 1955, starting with a three-day experiment. He introduced the concept of "Kushal Sadhana" for monks, emphasizing vigilance. In 1963, he started a "Pranidhan Kaksh" for training select monks and nuns in meditation and yoga. In 1982, he gave up sugar, jaggery, and all products made from them. During a 1982 Chaturmas, he gave up milk for four months and later experimented with a very limited diet of