Families gather for weekly worship at the Jain Temple in Queens. The men are draped in tangerine cloth; the women are festooned in saris of magenta and turquoise. Small children dance in circles, knocking into each other as their fathers bathe each idol in boiled water and their mothers chant and sway in time to the tambourine beat.

The children scuttle across the hall for Paathshala—religious study for Jains—with their teacher, Shilpa Pandya, while their parents practice pooja until lunchtime.

“What are the kinds of worldly beings?” Pandya asks her students, who number nearly two dozen, assembled around a large conference table.

An eager student jolts his hand into the air, excitedly waving it back and forth. “There are five,” he explains proudly, “One, two, three, four and five sense organisms.”

During the week, Pandya, 20, studies economics and south Asian studies at Columbia University and commutes home each evening to her family on Staten Island. On Sundays, she teaches Paathshala at the Jain Temple on 43-11 Ithaca St. in Elmhurst. A new program of instruction that formally began last fall, Pandya reasons if the temple can draw in the kids, entire families will follow. Weekly lessons typically focus on their reasons for ahimsa, or non-violence: All living beings possess consciousness; consuming or harming them in any way is forbidden.

“Open your reader and let’s review,” says Pandya, referring to the pink Jainism reader made of photocopied pages bound by three staples, “Turn to page six and let’s take turns reading it aloud together.”

The voices alternate: “One sense organisms have only one touch sense: plants, earth, water and fire; Two sense organisms have touch and taste senses: worms, shells; Three sense organisms have touch, taste and smell senses: ants, snails; Four sense organisms have touch, taste, smell and vision: butterflies, bees. Five sense organisms have touch, taste, smell, vision and sound: birds, animals, humans.”

“Do all living beings feel pain? All souls feel pain,” Pandya says, answering her own question, “Are humans always five-sense organisms?”

The question lingers in the air. “But what about if you’re deaf?” wonders 10-year-old Abhishek Sambaria.

“If you’re deaf, you still have ears,” Pandya explains, “They just don’t work.”
“Butterflies don’t have ears,” says Aneri Doshi, eight, practically falling out of her chair, “They feel pain even though they don’t have ears.”

“What about non-living things? Let’s review that,” offers Pandya.

Reading from the book, Sambaria says: “Non-living things do not have consciousness. They do not have sense organs.” Pictured below the text is a picture of a yellow Porsche, tennis racket and table.

“A dead person is not living,” yells out Doshi, still fidgety.

“It hurts when you pull out your hair because the root is alive but the bottom of your hair doesn’t hurt when you get a haircut because it’s non-living,” says Pandya, “It’s dead. Or diamonds that are living when they’re inside and attached to the earth, but not after they’re mined.”

Looking confused, Doshi wonders, “How come in India they shave their heads?”

“It’s cultural,” explains their teacher.

Unsatisfied, she persists, “I think it’s weird.”

Lining up the students to assemble for aarti, commensuration of the pooja, Pandya reminds them: “Next week’s homework is true and false questions. Tell me if things are living or non-living.”