Michhami Dukkadam: A childhood phrase and its lesson in forgiveness

Author Suvir Saran shares a personal reflection on the Jain tradition of Michhami Dukkadam, exploring its meaning of seeking forgiveness. The article discusses Paryushan, ahimsa, and the profound act of self-review and humility.

New Delhi [India], October 3 (ANI):

When I was ten, my best friend and classmate was Mohit Jain Dhoomimal. We were boys together at Modern School, Vasant Vihar, in Delhi. Today Mohit is the third-generation proprietor of Dhoomimal Art Centre in Connaught Place, the first art gallery in India. But my first encounter with Jain tradition came through the boy beside me in class, and a phrase that seemed to hold an entire philosophy in a few soft syllables. Jainism was not only a faith one practised in a temple or a discipline visible in what one ate. Once each year, it asked a person to turn towards another and seek forgiveness. The phrase was Michhami Dukkadam.

I did not then know its layers, its place in the Jain calendar, or the long work of self-examination that gives it weight. I knew the sound of it, and the tenderness with which it was offered. It has stayed with me, as childhood things do: not always understood at first, but quietly waiting for the life that will make them legible.

A message from Jayen Mehta saab, who heads Amul Dairy, brought the ritual back to me with renewed force. I call him Mehta saab. He wrote of Paryushan as a period of self-purification, and Samvatsari as a day when Jains seek forgiveness for harm committed by thought, word or deed.

The previous evening, he had begun a fast, giving up food and even water until the following morning—almost thirty-six hours. The fast, he wrote, reminded him of humility and fallibility. His message ended with Michhami Dukkadam. The length of the fast was not what moved me most, though I respect the discipline. What stayed with me was the reason for it: that at least once a year, we might become conscious of our shortcomings. Not defend them away. Not explain ourselves into innocence. Simply see them.

The Traditions of Paryushan and Samvatsari

Paryushan is observed over eight days by Shvetambara Jains; the Digambara tradition observes the ten-day festival of Das Lakshana. These observances take place during the monsoon season, when Jain mendicants traditionally settle in one place rather than travel, and lay people turn towards study, reflection, restraint and fasting.

Samvatsari is the culminating day for Shvetambaras. The annual pratikraman is a ritual review: a turning back towards one’s conduct, an acknowledgement of transgressions and a renewed effort to live with greater care. At its widest, the appeal for forgiveness reaches beyond teachers and family to all living beings.

The Philosophy of Forgiveness

The tradition is not a single ceremony with one uniform form; communities and sects observe it in distinct ways. Yet the moral movement is recognisable: look back, see what you have done, ask forgiveness, and resolve to become less injurious.

Michhami Dukkadam is commonly understood as a wish that wrongs or harmful acts become fruitless, and as a request for forgiveness. Its companion prayer gives the aspiration a startling breadth: may I forgive all living beings; may all living beings forgive me; may I be a friend to all and have enmity toward none. This is not merely a graceful phrase for a greeting card. It grows from Jain ethics, in which ahimsa, non-violence, asks a person to attend to injury in thought, speech and action, and to the vulnerability of life beyond the human. Pratikraman has a long textual and ritual history; scholarly research traces discussion of its procedures in Jain religious literature to the first millennium. Its practice is not a new-fashioned wellness exercise but part of a sustained discipline of moral attention.

A Mother's Wisdom on Humility and Recognition

When Mohit called yesterday, my mother, Sunita Saran, told him, “Mohit, I’ve forgiven you. I’ve sent you my message.” He asked what she meant. Her answer was so simple that it opened, for me, a door into the ritual. We are all human, she said. We err. We are different. We act and react differently; we see, feel, appreciate and understand things differently.

Sometimes, simply by being ourselves, we may make another person feel diminished, challenged, hurt or upset. We may not have intended injury. We may not even have known it had happened. But another person’s experience is not made unreal by our good intentions. Then she spoke of Namaste. To her, the gesture begins by bowing to the soul in the other person, by recognising that their presence matters beyond whatever may have occurred between us.

Michhami Dukkadam, she said, carries a related recognition, perhaps with an added insistence: for at least one day, we become mindful of our human shortcomings and of the possibility that our actions may have caused pain. I heard in her words something beyond etiquette. We bow because a person is more than the moment in which they disappointed us. We ask forgiveness because we, too, are more than the mistake we have made—but we are not less responsible for having made it. The ritual holds both truths in its small, open palm.

Individuality and Collective Responsibility

That balance is hard to keep. We want to be individuals. We want the freedom to live according to our own temperament, loves, convictions, appetites, faith or lack of faith. We want to dress as we wish, speak in our own voice, choose our companions, refuse the roles drafted for us by family or society. To be understood is to hope that another person will see the particular life beneath the visible difference. To be free is not to ask permission for one’s existence.

And still we live among other people. A life cannot be lived as if it were a private island with no shore touching anyone else’s. The sentence said in anger travels. The joke we call harmless may land on an old wound. Our silence may feel like rejection; our candour may feel like cruelty. We can be intent on telling the truth and careless about the person who must receive it. We can be protecting our independence while another person experiences our distance as abandonment. Sometimes a person is hurt because we have wronged them. Sometimes they are hurt because we have chosen a life they cannot accept. These are not the same thing, and the distinction matters.

The Art of a True Apology

To ask forgiveness for harm we have done is not to apologise for being ourselves. Nor should anyone be asked to surrender a necessary boundary so that somebody else can feel absolved. There are injuries that require an apology; there are differences that require patience; there are violations that require repair, changed behaviour, and consequences.

A ritual cannot make these distinctions for us. It can make us pause long enough to ask the questions we would rather hurry past: What did I do? What did it cost the other person? What must I change? What is mine to acknowledge, and what is not mine to carry? This is where the discipline of the day resists becoming a performance. “Forgive me” can be spoken as a plea for release from discomfort, as if the person who caused the hurt were entitled to immediate peace. It can even become a way of distributing responsibility so evenly that no one has to name what happened. But an honest apology is not a demand for absolution. It leaves the other person free to take time, to remain hurt, to set a boundary, or not to forgive. Forgiveness, when it comes, is a gift; it is not the fee charged to the injured person for keeping the relationship.

Humility, Ahimsa, and Many-Sided Truths

The fast, too, is not a contest in holiness. Austerity may sharpen attention; it can make appetite visible and remind the body that wanting is not the same as needing. But the point is not to prove that one can endure more than another. As Mehta saab’s note suggested, the lesson is humility. A fast that leaves the ego better fed than before has missed its meal.

The measure of restraint is not how dramatically we deny ourselves for a day, but whether we become more alert to the lives we might otherwise overlook. Jain thought gives this question an expansive horizon. Ahimsa asks us to reduce harm; the ideal is demanding precisely because harm is not confined to blows or deliberate cruelty. It can travel through speech, neglect, assumption, appetite and indifference.

The Jain idea of many-sidedness, anekantavada, also offers a humbling companion to this work: our view of reality is partial. We may hold a truth without possessing the whole of it. The person before us may see an aspect we cannot see from where we stand. This does not mean that every claim is equally true or that moral judgement is impossible. It means that certainty should not make us deaf.

Returning to Friendship and Understanding

I think again of Mohit and me at ten, learning friendship before we had the words for its demands. Childhood friendship often begins with a marvellous assumption: that the other person will be there tomorrow, and that being known is enough. Growing older teaches us the harder art. We discover that even love does not make us fluent in each other. We misread tones, carry old histories into new conversations, and expect another person to understand what we have not explained. Then, if we are lucky, we learn to return—not necessarily to the exact closeness we once had, but to the possibility of seeing each other afresh.

My mother’s message to Mohit was not a theological argument. It was an act of attention between two people whose lives have touched. She did not reduce him to a fault, or herself to a judge. She reminded him that the human being comes before the quarrel, without pretending that quarrels and hurts do not matter. There is a generosity in that order of seeing: first the soul, then the event; first the person, then the account of who was right.

The Courage to Be Human

Perhaps this is why the phrase has travelled so far beyond the Jain community. In a world that rewards instant judgement and public certainty, Michhami Dukkadam asks for a quieter courage: the courage to review oneself. It does not ask us to become smaller, less distinct or less alive. It asks us to notice that our freedom has neighbours. It asks us to become the kind of individual who can say, without theatrical shame and without defensive qualification: I may have caused you pain. I want to understand it. I will try to do better.

And it asks something equally difficult of the one who receives the appeal: that we not confuse mercy with amnesia, or compassion with surrender. We can forgive and still remember. We can recognise someone’s humanity and still insist on truth, safety and repair. We can bow to the soul in another without bowing away from our own.

I return to the image my mother gave me: a small bow. It is not an erasure of the self. It is a way of making room for the other. In that space, neither person has to disappear. One can remain whole and still be sorry; one can be hurt and still be open, if and when one is ready. Maybe this is the metaphysical grace of Michhami Dukkadam: it does not promise that we will never wound one another. It reminds us that we are answerable for the wounds we make, even when we did not mean to make them, and that humility can begin the work intention alone cannot finish.

I first heard the ritual as a boy through my friend Mohit. I understand it differently now, through Mehta saab’s fast and my mother’s generous words. What has endured is the invitation: turn back, look carefully, ask forgiveness without demanding it, and let the other person remain fully human. Let yourself remain human, too—not flawless, not condemned, but capable of repair. Michhami Dukkadam. May the harm I have done become fruitless. May I find the courage to see it, the tenderness to name it, and the discipline to do less of it tomorrow.

(ANI/Suvir Saran)Disclaimer: Suvir Saran is a Masterchef, Author, Hospitality Consultant And Educator. The views expressed in this article are his own.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Asianet Newsable English staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)