Lay Followers
Ten Householders and the Twelve Vows
Ten Householders and the Twelve Vows is a Jain story from the Lay Followers collection about lay vows, truth, humility, steadfastness and non-possessiveness. The seventh Anga tells of ten householders who took twelve vows before Bhagwan Mahavir. Anand of Vanijagram limits his wealth down to his towel and toothstick, and on his deathbed holds even Gautam Swami to the truth. Kamdev does not move through a god's night of terrors; others break and are called back by those who love them; a potter leaves Goshalak over a question about his pots. A long read on keeping faith with a shop to run, told the way the Upasakadasha tells it.
| Teaches | Lay vows, Truth, Humility, Steadfastness, Non-possessiveness |
|---|---|
| Collection | Lay Followers |
| Tellings | The full story (20 min) |
| Who it suits | For grown-ups |
| Tradition | Shvetambar telling |
| Thought to keep | A vow is kept less in one great night than in fourteen ordinary years. |
Read the opening of Ten Householders and the Twelve Vows
The opening of the story
The seventh of the Angas, the old books of the Shvetambar canon, is not about kings or monks. It is about ten householders. The tradition says Arya Sudharma told it to his pupil Jambu: the lives of ten men who kept shops, fields and herds, who had wives and sons and debts owed to them, and who took twelve vows before Bhagwan Mahavir and tried for twenty years to keep them. The book is called the Upasakadasha, the ten lay disciples. It repeats itself, as the canon does, because the same things happen to ordinary people again and again. What changes is how each one meets them.
The first was Anand, of the trading town of Vanijagram, where King Jitshatru ruled. Anand was a householder of the kind other men measure themselves against. Four crore of gold lay in his treasury, four crore more were out in trade, and four crore were in his house and lands. He owned four herds of cattle, ten thousand head in each. Kings and merchants brought him their questions, and his family leaned on him like a house on its central post. His wife was Shivananda.
Read the whole story of Ten Householders and the Twelve Vows See plans
What Ten Householders and the Twelve Vows teaches
Values Lay vows Truth Humility Steadfastness Non-possessiveness
To carry into the day
A vow is kept less in one great night than in fourteen ordinary years.
To talk about together
Anand would not take back a true word even for Gautam Swami, and Gautam Swami came back to apologise at once. Which of the two do you find harder to imitate, and why?
Sources
Retold for JainStory from the traditional story and checked against 1 published source:
- archive.org (3 pages)