ಜಯಾ ಏಕಾದಶಿ | Jaya Ekadashi

Jaya Ekadashi is the eleventh tithi of the bright fortnight of Magha. The name means victory. It goes by other names in places: Bhoumi Ekadashi in parts of the North, and Bhishma Ekadashi in the Tamil country, where it is associated with Bhishma on the bed of arrows in the same fortnight.

The mahatmya

The Bhavishyottara Purana gives it as Krishna answering Yudhishthira. Malyavan, a gandharva, and Pushpavati, an apsara, performed before Indra while absorbed in each other, and the performance came apart. Indra cursed them to be born as pishachas, and they lived in that state on the slopes of the Himalaya, in cold and hunger. On the ekadashi of the bright fortnight of Magha they happened to eat nothing and to stay awake through the night, and the purana says that the fast and the vigil, kept without knowing what they were, undid the curse.

From that story comes the phala usually quoted for the day: that keeping Jaya Ekadashi prevents birth as a pishacha, a preta or a ghost. That is what the text says, and it is worth reporting as such rather than as a statement about how the world works.

In practice

There is nothing distinctive in the keeping of it. No particular puja, no particular food, no Karnataka custom peculiar to the day, no temple festival. It is the fortnightly ekadashi, kept as any other is kept, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to manufacture detail for it. Its neighbours in the same bright fortnight, Ratha Saptami and Bhishma Ashtami, are the larger occasions of that stretch of Magha.

Jaya and Vijaya

The two are worth keeping apart. Both names mean victory and both fall in Magha, Jaya in the bright fortnight and Vijaya in the dark, so only the paksha distinguishes them. They have separate stories, and lists that give one of them the other mahatmya are common.

The rules of the fast, the parana and the viddha question are in the general post on ekadashi.