Wishing all our Jain readers a good Daslakshan / Paryushan Parvs. This year they are being celebrated from 12th September 2010 to 22nd Sep 2010 for 10 days.

This is a festival of fasts and spiritual awareness. All Jains are expected to fast at least one day, but many fasts all 10 days and sometimes as long as a full month.

This is celebrated by the Jain community for self-purification and up-liftment to adhere the ten universal virtues in practical life that lead us to the right path.

The ten universal virtues of the Daslakshan Parvs are

• Uttam Kshama Dharma (Supreme Forgiveness) – To observe tolerance whole-heartedly, shunning anger.
  
• Uttam Mardava Dharma (Tenderness or Humility) – To observe the virtue of humility subduing vanity and passions.
• Uttam Aarjava Dharma (Straight-forwardness or Honesty) – To practice a deceit-free conduct in life by vanquishing the passion of deception.
• Uttam Shauch Dharma (Contentment or Purity) – To keep the body, mind and speech pure by discarding greed.
  
• Uttam Satya Dharma (Truthfulness) – To speak affectionate and just words with a holy intention causing no injury to any living being.
  
• Uttam Sanyam Dharma (Self-restraint) – To defend all living beings with utmost power in a cosmopolitan spirit abstaining from all the pleasures provided by the five senses – touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing; and the sixth – mind.
• Uttam Tap Dharma (Penance or Austerities) – To practice austerities putting a check on all worldly allurements.
  
• Uttam Tyag Dharma (Renunciation) – To give fourfold charities – Ahara (food), Abhaya (fearlessness), Aushadha (medicine), and Shastra Dana (distribution of Holy Scriptures), and to patronize social and religious institutions for self and other uplifts.
  
• Uttam Akinchan Dharma (Non-attachment) – To enhance faith in the real self as against non-self i.e., material objects; and to discard internal परिग्रह  viz. anger and pride; and external परिग्रह viz. accumulation of gold, diamonds, and royal treasures.
  
• Uttam Brahmachary Dharma (Chastity or celibacy) – To observe the great vow of celibacy; to have devotion for the inner soul and the omniscient Lord; to discard the carnal desires, vulgar fashions, child and old-age marriages, dowry dominated.

{Ref}