What a Jain does not eat

The list is old and has not changed. Nemicandra's Pravacanasāroddhāra gives it in two Prakrit verses, and the same twenty-two, in the same order, are the bāvīs abhakṣya recited in Gujarati and Hindi households now: the five figs, the four vikṛtis, snow, poison, hail, earth, the night meal, many-seeded fruit, the common bodies, pickles, pulse in raw curd, brinjal, unknown fruit and flowers, empty fruit, and food that has turned. Hemacandra preferred a list of sixteen with the same members folded differently (Yogaśāstra 3.6–7), and the Digambara Āśādhara's twenty-two drop snow, hail, poison and earth for water kept in leather, honey as eye-salve, asafoetida touched by leather, and flowers; the atlas draws Nemicandra's, which is the one on the wall.

The verse gives no reasons. The commentary does, and the plate is laid by them rather than by the verse's order: thirteen of the twenty-two are forbidden because living beings too small to see are in them or arise in them - the figs, honey, butter, wine, meat, the meal in the dark, the pickle, the curd on the pulse, the dish that has turned. Three are forbidden because the beings in them are without number: the common bodies with their infinite souls, the fruit with a soul in every seed, the brinjal. Three are the elements raw - snow, hail, earth - water-bodied and earth-bodied beings eaten for no need, and salt is expressly excepted. And three are a different kind of reason: poison, which harms the eater; the unknown fruit, which cannot be judged; the empty fruit, where much is destroyed for little eaten.

Read that way the list is one rule with four faces, and the rule is the one the whole atlas turns on: there is life where you cannot see it, and the kitchen is where you meet it. The numbers on the bowls are the verse's, so the recitation can still be followed round the plate.