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Jainism
Jains in Bihar are the followers of the Tirthankaras.
Vardhamana Mahavira, their last Tirthankara was born about the middle of the sixth century
B.C. at Kundagrama near Vaishali, about 27 miles north of Patna, in Bihar. Vardhamana Mahavira renounced the world and became an ascetic.
He lived a life of extreme self-mortification under a shala tree on the banks
of the river, Rijupalika, where he achieved the state called nirvana or Kaivalya. He
was acclaimed as a Kevalin (supreme omniscient), jina (conqueror), arhat
(blessed one) and Tirthankara (ford-finder). In a long wandering
life of 42 years in north and south Bihar, he gathered a considerable following
of monks known as Nirgrathas, or men who discarded all social bonds who after
Mahavira's death became known as Jains.
The Jains believe God as such does not exist. A liberated
soul, that of a prophet or Jinas is god. Absolute truth comes only to these
periodic Redeemers. The universe-plants, animals and
human is a plurality of Jivas, all subject to the cosmic process of Karma
and rebirth. One can free oneself through austerity and penance. Mahavira breathed his last at a place called
Pavapuri near Patna. A large number of Jain monks too died on the famous Parasnath, a mountain take its name from the twenty-third Jain
Tirthankara.
Sikhism
Patna was the birth place of Gobind Singh,
the tenth and last
guru of the Sikh brotherhood and the site where the Guru was born is marked by a temple
containing his cradle and shoes. It was Guru Gobind Singh who gave the present
militaristic form and character to the originally pacifist Sikh religion.
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