Navpad Oli

Twice a year, for nine days each time, a large number of Svetambara Jains eat one meal a day of boiled grain and pulses with no oil, no ghee, no milk, no curd, no sugar, no green vegetable and no spice. Deliberately tasteless food, once a day, for nine consecutive days. That is Navpad Oli, also called Ayambil Oli, and each of the nine days is dedicated to one of the nine pads — positions — of the Siddhachakra.

It is one of the most widely kept Svetambara observances after Paryushan, and it is unusual in Jain practice for pairing a strict physical discipline with a specific object of contemplation for each day. The fast is not undifferentiated endurance. Each day has a subject.

The nine pads

The Navpad are the nine positions of the Siddhachakra, the diagram at the centre of the observance. Five are beings; four are qualities.

The first five are the Panch Parameshthi, the five supreme beings saluted in the Navkar Mantra — the mantra a Jain recites more often than any other, and the one that names no deity and asks for nothing. The last four are the Ratnatraya, the three jewels of right faith, knowledge and conduct, with austerity added as the fourth. The structure is therefore not arbitrary: the Oli walks a practitioner through the whole of the Jain path in nine days, first the beings who embody it and then the qualities that constitute it.

Each day carries an associated colour, and observers of the full discipline eat food of that colour where the ayambil rules allow — white for the first two days, red for Acharya, yellow or saffron for Upadhyaya, black or dark for Sadhu, and white again for the four qualities. Each day also has its own count of mala recitations, its own khamasana prostrations, and its own kausagga.

When Navpad Oli is observed

Twice a year, both times running from the seventh day of the bright fortnight to the full moon:

• Chaitri Oli — in Chaitra, March or April, ending on Chaitra Purnima.
• Ashwin Oli, also called Aso Oli — in Ashwin, September or October, ending on Ashwin Purnima. This one falls inside chaturmas, shortly after Paryushan.

The two Olis are six months apart, which is intentional: the observance is designed to be repeated. The full traditional undertaking is both Olis every year for four and a half years — eighty-one Olis in total — completed with an udyapan, a formal ceremony of conclusion. Many people keep one Oli a year, or a partial Oli, or a single day of ayambil on the day of the pad that matters most to them. All of these are recognised; the nine-day form is the complete one, not the only permitted one.

What ayambil actually permits

Ayambil is one meal a day, seated, taken in daylight, of cooked food from which every source of taste has been removed. In practice this means boiled grain — rice, wheat, jowar, bajra — and boiled pulses, with water. Excluded are oil, ghee and all fats; milk, curd and every dairy product; sugar, jaggery and sweeteners; green vegetables and fruit; and the spices that make food palatable. Only boiled water is drunk, and nothing at all is taken after sunset.

The purpose is the removal of rasa — taste as an object of attachment — rather than the reduction of quantity. An ayambil meal may be a full one. What it may not be is enjoyable in the ordinary way, and eating without that pull, once a day, for nine days, is a specific and quite different discipline from going without food. Many Jain communities run an ayambil shala, a kitchen that prepares compliant food throughout the Oli, precisely because doing it correctly at home for nine days is difficult. See Jain fasting explained for how ayambil relates to upvas, ekasana and the longer tapasyas.

Shripal and Mayanasundari

Navpad Oli is inseparable from a story, and the story is read aloud across the nine days in most communities that keep it.

Mayanasundari, a princess, tells her father that a person's condition follows from their own karma rather than from a king's favour. Angered, he marries her to Shripal, a man afflicted with leprosy and leading a company of seven hundred others with the same disease. Mayanasundari accepts without complaint. On the advice of an acharya she and Shripal undertake the Navpad Oli — the nine days of ayambil with veneration of the nine pads — and at its completion the water used in the veneration is applied, and Shripal and all seven hundred are cured. Shripal goes on to become a king.

The story is told as a demonstration of the efficacy of the Siddhachakra, and it is worth being precise about what Jain teaching takes that to mean. There is no deity in the story who grants a request; there is no petition answered. Jainism has no creator god and the Tirthankaras, being liberated, do not intervene. What the narrative asserts is that veneration and austerity performed with right faith shed karma, and that the shedding of karma changes what happens — which is the same claim the doctrine makes everywhere else, told as a life rather than as an argument.

The Siddhachakra

The Siddhachakra is the diagram itself: a lotus of nine positions, the Arihant at the centre and the other eight arranged around it, usually inscribed on a metal plate or yantra. In Murtipujak temples it is venerated during the Oli with water, sandal and flowers, and the culminating rite — the Siddhachakra Mahapujan — is one of the larger ceremonies of the Svetambara year. Sthanakvasi and Terapanth Jains, who do not venerate images or yantras, keep the Oli as fasting and contemplation of the nine pads without the diagram. See Svetambara Jainism for what divides the three traditions.