Paryushana is the most important festival of the Svetambara Jains, an eight-day period of intensified religious observance kept in the month of Bhadrapada (August-September). Its name suggests "abiding" or "coming together", and it falls during the monsoon, the season in which Jain mendicants, avoiding travel that would harm the abundant small life of the rains, settle in one place; the laity join them in a concentrated period of fasting, penance, study and self-examination. Degrees of fasting are undertaken, from partial abstention to complete fasts of the full eight days or longer, and the Kalpa Sutra, which recounts the lives of the Tirthankaras, above all Mahavira, is read publicly.
The festival draws the whole of Jain practice into focus: non-violence (ahimsa), restraint of the appetites, the confession of faults, and the deliberate turning of the mind from the outer world to the state of the soul. It is not a festival of celebration but of purification and discipline, the year's great occasion for taking stock of one's conduct against the demanding Jain ideal. Its keeping expresses the Jain conviction that the religious life is above all a work of self-conquest, and that a fixed season of heightened austerity is needed to renew that work.