Stopped or Destroyed? Marking Samvara and Nirjara
A 6-mark essay asks students to distinguish asrava, samvara and nirjara and to show how the prescribed prose passage ties them to right conduct. The scheme gives 2 marks per term, and each definition must end with what it asks of the practitioner to earn its second mark. Of forty-four scripts, nineteen define samvara as the destruction of karma and nirjara as the stopping of new karma - exactly reversed. Twelve write that a Tirthankara's grace burns away the devotee's karma. Five quote the seven tattvas accurately and then stop, adding nothing about conduct. Eight are fully correct. The head of department asks whether the reversed answers deserve partial credit, since the two words were 'known'.
1. Give a definitional test that separates asrava, samvara and nirjara, and use it on the reversed scripts.
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One question settles all three: is karma being added, blocked, or removed?
Asrava - added. The inflow of karma matter into the soul, through the activity of mind, speech and body together with the passions.
Samvara - blocked. The stopping of that inflow. Nothing already bound is removed here; the channel is closed.
Nirjara - removed. The falling away of karma already bound, whether by enduring its fruit or by austerity.
Apply the test to the reversed script: it says destruction happens at the stage where nothing has yet entered. That is a temporal impossibility - you cannot destroy what has not arrived. The reversal is not a slip of vocabulary; it breaks the order of the tattvas, and an answer that has the mechanism backwards cannot earn either term's full marks. Award the mark for recognising that two distinct processes exist, and withhold the definitional marks, stating the reason on the script so the student sees the test rather than a red cross.
2. The twelve 'grace' answers: what do they score, and how do you correct the concept from the passage?
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Score them low - at most one mark, and only for whatever accurate description of karma they supply. The doctrine fails on its own terms: karma is matter bound to an individual soul, so another being's karma cannot be burned for you, and the Tirthankara's role in the passage is to teach, not to dispense. The Tirthankara is the guide; the work is the self's, through right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, with austerity as the agent of nirjara.
The correction should come from the passage's own verbs - find the line where the teacher instructs and the line where the hearer is told to act, and let the student see who is doing what. Then state the principle: in this system nothing external substitutes for the self's own effort, which is why the path is described as a discipline rather than a petition.
Handle it privately if the misconception is a settled belief; the examination answer is still wrong, but the classroom argument should be about what the text says, not about the student's faith.
3. The five accurate-but-incomplete scripts: how many marks, and how do you make the missing half visible to the class?
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Four out of six. Each term's first mark is earned by an accurate definition; the second mark is conditional on naming what the term asks of the practitioner, and accurate quotation is not the same as showing the consequence.
Make the loss visible with a three-column table on the board: term, what it is, what it asks of me. Have the class fill the third column for all three terms - guarding the senses and the passions for samvara, austerity and endurance for nirjara, and so on - and then rewrite one of the five scripts live, keeping every word of its definitions and adding only the third column. Students accept the mark once they see that the correction costs two sentences and no new knowledge.
Also tell them why the scheme is built that way: the passage is an instruction, not a glossary, so an answer that never reaches conduct has described the machinery and missed the point of the text.