Anuvrata (Jain Lay Vows)

Jain ethical life is structured around five fundamental restraints, ahimsa or nonviolence, satya or truthfulness, asteya or not stealing, brahmacharya or chastity, and aparigraha or non attachment to possessions, and the tradition asks two different intensities of commitment to the same five principles depending on whether a person has taken up the mendicant life or remains a householder. Jain monks and nuns take these as mahavratas, great vows, observed absolutely and without qualification, extending nonviolence for instance to avoiding harm to even the smallest and least visible forms of life through practices such as straining drinking water and sweeping the path ahead of one's feet. The anuvratas are the lesser vows built from the same five principles but scaled to what a life still embedded in family, work, trade and property can sustain, permitting a layperson to observe nonviolence, truthfulness, honesty, marital fidelity and limited possession without the near total renunciation the mendicant vow demands.

The distinction is not read within Jainism as a lesser and a greater path toward two different goals but as the same single path toward liberation from karma taken at two different speeds, the lay anuvratas understood as building the ethical foundation and karmic lightening from which a monastic vocation, should it come, would eventually rise.

Classical Jain lay ethics extends the five anuvratas into a fuller set of twelve vows, adding three guna vratas, supplementary vows that further restrict conduct, such as limiting travel and consumption to reduce incidental harm, and four shiksha vratas, disciplinary vows practicing meditation, periodic restraint and hospitality to mendicants, which together shape a layperson's life around minimising violence in the necessarily compromised business of eating, trading and working in the world.

The nonviolence vow has had the most visible cultural consequence: Jain lay communities have historically clustered in trades understood to minimise direct harm to living beings, such as commerce, banking, gem trading and other occupations distant from agriculture and animal husbandry, which unavoidably involve killing, and strict Jain vegetarianism, excluding root vegetables on the grounds that uprooting them kills the whole plant and disturbs soil organisms, follows directly from anuvrata reasoning about which harms a householder can and cannot avoid. The vows are typically taken formally before a mendicant teacher, and a layperson may progress through a sequence of eleven pratimas, stages of increasing renunciation, that mark advancing lay practice and can eventually lead, for those who choose it, toward full monastic ordination and the mahavratas the anuvratas were always understood to anticipate.