Siddha

A siddha is a soul that has shed all karma and left embodiment for ever, the second of the five saluted in the Jain prayer and the final goal of the whole path.

Liberation completed

Where the arihant is omniscient but still embodied, the siddha has cast off the remaining karmas and the body itself at the end of that embodied life, and the pure soul rises to the summit of the universe, there abiding for ever in its innate perfection, infinite knowledge, perception, bliss and energy, wholly free of the cycle of birth and death. The siddha is thus the fully liberated soul, the end state of the entire Jain endeavour, and no further becoming remains to it.

The goal saluted

The siddha is saluted second in the Navkar Mantra, after the arihant, and the order is significant, for the arihant, still teaching in the world, is honoured first as the source of the accessible path, while the siddha is the goal toward which that path leads, and both are saluted before the living offices of the community. The standing is not a role that anyone occupies in the world but the condition of the perfected souls beyond it, so the siddha is less an office than the realised end of the path, and the daily salutation of the siddhas keeps that final goal, the liberation of the soul from all karma and embodiment, before the mind of every Jain who recites the prayer.

Jain cosmology locates the siddhas at a specific place, the Siddhashila, a crescent-shaped realm at the very summit of the universe, above the topmost heaven, where liberated souls are described as dwelling forever in undisturbed perfection, a precise cosmological answer to the question of where liberation actually leads that few other traditions attempt to state so concretely.

What follows from the doctrine of complete liberation is a point that distinguishes Jain devotion sharply from prayer in theistic religions: because a siddha has transcended all activity, including the capacity to act in the world or to respond to a petitioner, reciting homage to the siddhas in the Navkar Mantra cannot be a request for intervention or favour of any kind, since the being addressed is, by the very definition of its liberation, incapable of intervening. Jain teachers describe the purpose of the salutation instead as inspirational and purifying for the person reciting it, fixing the mind on the reality of perfected liberation as a guide and a goal rather than seeking any response from beings who, by their own perfection, can give none.

The same word carries an entirely different sense in the Hindu tantric and yogic traditions, where a siddha is a living adept who has attained supernatural powers, siddhis, through yogic practice, a figure still very much embodied and active in the world, in direct contrast to the Jain siddha's utter transcendence of embodiment and activity described above. A reader moving between Jain and Hindu religious vocabulary needs to keep the two senses separate; the shared root word points to accomplishment or perfection in both cases, but the two traditions describe almost opposite states by it.