Samayika

Samayika is a central practice of Jainism, a period of meditative equanimity in which the practitioner withdraws from all harmful activity to sit in calm, balanced awareness for a fixed time, traditionally about forty-eight minutes. The word derives from a term for equanimity or evenness of mind, and this state of undisturbed balance, free of attachment and aversion, of the pull toward the pleasant and the push against the unpleasant, is precisely what the practice cultivates. During samayika the practitioner renounces sinful acts, sits in stillness, and turns the mind to reflection, self-examination, the recitation of sacred verses and meditation, resolving for the duration to treat all beings with the same friendliness and to regard gain and loss, pleasure and pain, with an even mind.

Samayika is one of the practices in which the lives of the Jain layperson and the mendicant most nearly meet. For the ascetic, equanimity is a permanent state; for the layperson, samayika is a temporary entry into that same state, a period of living, for its duration, as an ascetic does. It is counted among the essential duties of the observant Jain and among the disciplinary vows a layperson may take up.

Samayika's forty-eight minutes is a precise unit in the texts, but how often a lay Jain actually performs it varies enormously in practice, from a handful of highly observant householders who undertake it daily to the much larger number who keep it only during Paryushana, the annual eight to ten day period of intensified observance that is, for many otherwise moderately practising Jains, the one time in the year religious discipline is taken up in earnest. Temples and community halls in Jain population centres, particularly in Gujarat, Rajasthan and among the diaspora in the United States and United Kingdom, maintain dedicated samayika halls or quiet rooms specifically furnished for the observance, providing the plain woolen or cotton mat, the small whisk broom used to gently clear a spot of insects before sitting, and the mouth-cloth, so that a lay person without a private space suited to the practice at home has somewhere to keep it.

Jain reform movements and lay teaching organisations in the twentieth century put considerable effort into popularising daily samayika among a laity that had, by their own account, let the practice slide into a Paryushana-only observance, producing simplified instructional booklets and, more recently, guided audio and video recordings aimed specifically at making the forty-eight minutes approachable for someone with no prior training in what to do during it, an effort that reflects a broader and recurring concern within the tradition that its core lay discipline has been thinning even as its most visible public festivals remain well attended.