The practice of Sallekhana is taken by monks, laymen who are either terminally ill, extremely old with disabilities.
In other words it is taken by persons who are seeing their death inevitably.
Its not taken by normal monks who are in healthy condition. It is a way of embracing death when it is inevitable due to underlying medical conditions, extreme disabilities due to old age along with religious rituals by gradual giving up food in a phased manner.
The Buddha would never had gone for Sallekhana since he was going for the highest goal and Sallekhana was not really relevant for him as he was in a healthy condition . He would have got in the highly starved condition due to intense meditation without food intake to maintain the continuity of the meditation.
Again the concept of torment is relative.One may think a practice is tormenting one self but the purpose is different.For example a new person may find sitting cross legged continuosly as means of tormenting oneself, though the purpose is different.
Similarly in Jains, the practices are not for tormenting oneself , eg.removal of hair by pulling.Similarly intense fasting for several days would have been to enable you for continous meditation for days together without a break. If you cannot fast for longer periods, you cannot continuosly meditate for several days.Though the original intent would have been lost over a period of time as the meditative practices compared to buddhist practices were lost over a period of time
First of all, yes, positive depiction of austerity is rare in the suttas. So we have to position ourselves towards these minority voices. If I say they’re irrelevant then I dismiss a Jain influence automatically. If I say ‘even a minority voice needs to be explained’ then there is a more complex (and in my opinion realistic) case.
A general question is, what’s the deal with the stern Mahakassapa? Was he an outliner, or was he more important but later marginalized? Are his practices more in line with contemporary Jain and/or austere samana practitioners?
And in detail, how do I relate to austerity when it occurs?
Eg Snp 1.4 “Faith is the seed, tapas the rain; wisdom is my yoke and plow.”
Or Snp 2.7 "The rishis of the past controlled themselves and were tapassins; having abandoned the five strands of sense pleasures, they practiced for their own good.
DN 14 and Dhp 14 have the past Buddha Vipassī declare patient endurance to be the highest tapa
As mentioned above we have a sometimes repeated passage that says:
Here, a bhikkhu patiently endures cold and heat; hunger and thirst; contact with flies, mosquitoes, wind, the burning sun, and serpents; rude and offensive ways of speech; he is able to bear up with arisen bodily feelings that are painful, racking, sharp, piercing, harrowing, disagreeable, sapping one’s vitality.
It is not self-inflicted, but apart from enduring life I also read a position of austerity here that almost matches the Jain practice. And what is the message of this passage anyway? Something like ‘don’t escape the sun, the rain, don’t take drugs against the pain, don’t do anything against rude speech’…
Yes, it is similar but not the same.
To me, the standard passage you quote is all about a bhikkhu/ bhikkhuni preparing himself/herself to the chances of facing these difficulties once they have taken up the robes as they pursue and develop the right livelihood factor of the path.
As they move from one place to another, through the seasons and the years of their spiritual career they will encounter such things and they should be brave and strong to keep going despite them.
Hence the phrasing which points to endurance, patience. It is all about having the courage and determination to keep going even when these things come about.
The Jain practice is different. The livelihood of the ascetic adherents of that doctrine is all about seeking painful and stressful circumstances as they understand that is what right livelihood is.
In their case, it is all about actively pursuing those things.
All in all, according to the Jain soteriology and cosmology, it is all that physical stress and suffering that causes the soul to shed the impurities of the kamma surrounding it and stopping it from floating up and sticking to the ceiling of the universe, siddhashila.
By this way, the message of passage you quote is:
Bhikkhus/bhikkhunis, as you develop the eightfold path:
Be prepared to patiently endure cold and heat;
Be prepared to patiently endure hunger and thirst;
Be prepared to patiently endure contact with flies, mosquitoes, wind, the burning sun, and serpents;
Be prepared to patiently endure rude and offensive ways of speech;
Be prepared to patiently endure and bear up with arisen bodily feelings that are painful, racking, sharp, piercing, harrowing, disagreeable, sapping one’s vitality.
You will encounter these things and, despite the challenge they will represent, don’t yet give up, be strong and keep going…
This is very very different to the almost insane concept of a spiritual path being all about pursuing these things!
Well, that’s a twisted perspective. The idea is to become indifferent towards the sensual realm, including pain.
Did the Buddha never redefine tapas like he did the many other pre-existing non-Buddhist terms he adopted?
This just sounds like the kinds of things anyone could expect to experience while living in a jungle. That certainly sums up my experience living in a forest monastery in Thailand.
Perhaps this is just an extreme example used to drive home the point? Like in the Simile of the Saw?
I’ve always been under the impression that in the non-Buddhist ascetic traditions pain was seen to either:
- purify one’s kamma
- be part-and-parcel of the practices that purified one’s kamma, and so was unavoidable and necessary (no pain, no gain)
- or at the very least was able to signify one’s spiritual attainments through the enduring of it, like stretching one’s penis by tying heavy rocks to it and lifting the rocks. You can find pictures of Hindu sadhus doing this today.
I can only recommend to read the Acaranga Sutra, instead of pulling arguments from random sources. Maybe some of you forgot that Buddhism is for many outsiders the religion that states that “everything is suffering”. Sounds depressing? So, to judge another religion like Jainism based on insufficient knowledge is cheap. The goal of Jainism is liberation and to end the cycle of rebirth, not to maximize pain in a BDSM dungeon.
For the sake of the splendour, honour, and glory of this life, for the sake of birth, death, and final liberation, for the removal of pain, all these causes of sin are at work, which are to be comprehended and renounced in this world. He who, in the world, comprehends and renounces these causes of sin, is called a rewardknowing sage (muni). [Acaranga Sutra 1.1.1]
Sounds like favorite items from an organic food store 
Tasty/funny😂
I would highly recommend these three volumes which provide an in-depth study of the histories and literature of both! Here is an archive link to the second volume. The third I couldn’t find easily but I found a PDF of the first volume from a site called jainelibrary.org.
978-81-8069-338-0-768x1181|325x500
It outlines many of the similarities and differences between the two traditions of the śramaṇa dharma, while highlighting some of the ‘superiority conceit’ found in both.
While the above resources are better, here are a few of my thoughts.
While austerity is a crucial element, it far from defines the religion. As an example, the twelve vows of laypeople are quite practical. They include limiting unnecessary activities, limiting disposable and non-disposable items, and devoting oneself to meditation and the moon phase observance days that Buddhists do.
I would say the biggest difference is that Buddhism focuses on contemplating ‘not-self’, whereas Jainism focuses on contemplating ‘self’.
Austerity as gautama did is an extreme exmple of body mortification. Most of the austerities are practices many Buddhists engage in.
Here is a short list I found;
"External austerities include fasting, abstinences, restraint in begging alms, renunciation of delicacies, self-mortification, retreat from the world.
Internal austerities include penance, respect to elders, service to others, study, meditation, abandonment of the body in one’s thoughts."
To clarify my own position, I didn’t start this thread with the intention of assessing or critiquing Jain beliefs. I don’t know enough about them to do that. So I’m not taking any position on what Jains believe or practice. I merely wanted feedback on Bronkhort’s idea that there might have been Jain influences in the suttas, especially in regard to the passage I quoted.
Buddhism’s relationship with ascetic practice (the dhutangas) is an interesting topic, but wasn’t what I intended to discuss.
If you happen to be interested in Jain influence in mahāyāna, there is quite a bit in the tathāgatagarbha sūtras. The aṅgulimālīya sūtra is a good example of this. The tathāgatagarbha is a lot like the Jain view of ātman, and it promotes abstaining from flesh, although it has passages critiquing Jain practice as suttas do.
This article should also be of interest, it discusses parallels and similar passages in early texts. 
Bronkhorst is an interesting case of great erudition and, when it suits him, mixing texts from very different time periods to make his point. I’m afraid this is such a case where he’s referencing Jain texts which clearly don’t belong to an early stratum. Hence, it isn’t suitable to draw a connection to the Buddha’s time.
I should mention, for the volume I provided the link for above, that one probably won’t be of much interest as it deals with comparison of language and dialect mostly. The first volume is far more interesting as it deals with the contents of the suttas themselves.
Can you provide the free download link version? 
These types of threads that go into connections between Jainism and early Buddhism are always kind of difficult. This may be in part because there is so little surviving early textual evidence for Jainism. But a few things may be mixed together:
- Asceticism in general
- Buddhist asceticism
- Harmful or senseless non-Buddhist asceticism as depicted in Buddhist texts
- Jainism as depicted in Buddhist texts
- Jainism as it existed hundreds of years after the Buddha (from surviving texts)
- Jainism as it exists today
It’s also hard to discuss asceticism because it can mean anything and everything from simply eating once a day, to some pretty extreme and harmful practices that would be objectionable to most.
The excerpt from the Mahasaccaka Sutta may not be referring to practices from Jainism at all. While Bronkhorst does claim that the passage from the Mahasaccaka Sutta describes mainstream meditation, all his other examples in which the tongue being pressed against the palate are from texts belonging to the Brahmanical tradition. And Hindu yogis are still the ones that do this. I have not seen examples of this practice being advised in Jainism.
Yes, you have a point. It’s known as khecari-mudra
The MN 12 Mahasinada Sutta indicated Jain practices done by Bodhisatta before his enlightenment (although the Pali commentary said it is during one of his previous lives, not in his last live):
And this is what my self-mortification was like. I went naked, ignoring conventions. I licked my hands, and didn’t come or stop when asked. I didn’t consent to food brought to me, or food prepared specially for me, or an invitation for a meal. I didn’t receive anything from a pot or bowl; or from someone who keeps sheep, or who has a weapon or a shovel in their home; or where a couple is eating; or where there is a woman who is pregnant, breastfeeding, or who has a man in her home; or where food for distribution is advertised; or where there’s a dog waiting or flies buzzing. I accepted no fish or meat or liquor or wine, and drank no beer. I went to just one house for alms, taking just one mouthful, or two houses and two mouthfuls, up to seven houses and seven mouthfuls. I fed on one saucer a day, two saucers a day, up to seven saucers a day. I ate once a day, once every second day, up to once a week, and so on, even up to once a fortnight. I lived committed to the practice of eating food at set intervals.
I ate herbs, millet, wild rice, poor rice, water lettuce, rice bran, scum from boiling rice, sesame flour, grass, or cow dung. I survived on forest roots and fruits, or eating fallen fruit.
I wore robes of sunn hemp, mixed hemp, corpse-wrapping cloth, rags, lodh tree bark, antelope hide (whole or in strips), kusa grass, bark, wood-chips, human hair, horse-tail hair, or owls’ wings. I tore out hair and beard, committed to this practice. I constantly stood, refusing seats. I squatted, committed to the endeavor of squatting. I lay on a mat of thorns, making a mat of thorns my bed. I was committed to the practice of immersion in water three times a day, including the evening. And so I lived committed to practicing these various ways of mortifying and tormenting the body. Such was my practice of self-mortification.
MN 12 seems to show that the Buddha previously carried out every type of extreme ascetic practice. But he never describes himself as a Jain (Niganthaputta). The ascetic practices were associated with developing supernormal powers, but MN 12 is making the point that they didn’t develop the wisdom of liberation.
MN 12 describes Gautama’s practice as a brahmacarya with four angas, and lists those four. MN 56 and DN 2 describe the practices of Nigantha Nataputta (Mahavira) as having a fourfold restraint, but those seem to be unrelated and with little overlap.
Going back to MN 12, can most of the practices be traced back to the Jains specifically? Going naked is one obvious practice of some Jains, as is non-harming… But, for example, do we know that Jains were wearing owl wings or tree bark? What about antelope hide? Wasn’t wearing furs and sitting on furs associated with Brahmin ascetics and hermits?
Wearing tree bark, living in the forest, and eating wild fruits is a typical description of the sramanas (according to Megasthenes). But do we know that Jains specifically engaged in those practices, or that those practices were characteristic of the Jains?
This list refers quite clearly to ‘wanderers of other sects’ as a collective term. Niganthas were either naked or wore white garments.
Ajina, the black antelope hide was indeed the ceremonial dress used in the Vedic diksa consecration ritual which appears already in the Taittiriya-Samhita. The yajamana sponsor of the ritual wore it only for a short time though. In the Atharvaveda it is the brahmacarin who wears the antelope skin, probably for a longer time. Later it became synonymous with an ascetic attitude and was probably taken over by ascetic professionals - but not by Jains.