What Is Jainism? Non-Violence Taken to Its Logical Conclusion

It is one of the oldest continuously practised religions, and it does not regard itself as founded at all. Its teaching is transmitted by a series of twenty-four tirthankaras, a word meaning ford-makers, beings who achieved liberation and showed others the crossing. The twenty-third, Parshvanatha, is generally accepted by historians as a real figure of around the ninth century BC. The twenty-fourth, Mahavira, was a contemporary of the Buddha in the sixth or fifth century BC, born to a noble family in what is now Bihar, who renounced his position at thirty, spent twelve years in severe asceticism, and taught for thirty years afterwards. The two movements arose in the same region at the same time among the same questioning of Vedic ritual and animal sacrifice, and they share vocabulary, including karma and liberation, while differing sharply on what those words mean.

The metaphysics is unusual and the practice follows from it directly. Every living thing has a soul, which is eternal, individually distinct and naturally omniscient and blissful, and souls are found not only in humans and animals but in plants, in microscopic beings and, in the most inclusive classification, in earth, water, fire and air. Karma is not a moral ledger kept by a god, and there is no creator god in the system at all. It is a subtle physical substance that sticks to the soul as a result of action, particularly action driven by passion, and weighs it down in the cycle of rebirth, obscuring its natural qualities in the way dust obscures a mirror. Liberation means removing the accumulated matter and preventing more from adhering, which is achieved by restraint, austerity and above all by not harming, since violence is the stickiest action there is. The famous parable of the blind men and the elephant is theirs, and it illustrates a formal doctrine that any statement about reality is true only from a particular standpoint.

Practice is organised around five vows, taken absolutely by monks and nuns and in a limited household form by laypeople:

• •Ahimsa, non-violence, which governs everything else and extends to thought and speech as well as action
• •Satya, truthfulness, including silence where the truth would cause harm
• •Asteya, not taking what is not given
• •Brahmacharya, chastity, meaning celibacy for the renounced and fidelity for the married
• •Aparigraha, non-attachment, meaning for monks the renunciation of possessions and for laypeople a voluntary limit on wealth, which is the basis of a strong tradition of giving

The lay diet is vegetarian without exception, and generally excludes root vegetables, honey and anything fermented, along with eating after dark, which was originally intended to avoid consuming insects drawn to a lamp. Occupations have historically been chosen to avoid harm, which excluded farming and pushed the community into trade, banking, law and later diamonds and publishing, and helps explain its economic position. Animal shelters, called panjrapoles, have been run by Jain communities for centuries and take in old and injured livestock that nobody else will keep. The community is divided into two main traditions: the Digambara, whose most advanced monks own nothing at all including clothing, and the Shvetambara, whose monks wear white and who accept that women can achieve liberation in their present life, a point the other tradition disputes. A practice called sallekhana, a voluntary fast to death undertaken by the very old or terminally ill under supervision, is regarded within the tradition as the final act of non-attachment and has been the subject of Indian court cases about its legality.

Its reach is larger than its numbers. Vegetarianism in India, though not exclusively Jain in origin, was strongly reinforced by it, and the broader Indian commitment to non-violence has Jain roots. Gandhi was raised in Gujarat among Jain neighbours, was influenced by the Jain teacher Shrimad Rajchandra, whom he called one of the three great influences on his life, and took the principle of ahimsa from that context into political resistance, from which it passed to the American civil rights movement and to non-violent campaigns since. The doctrine of multiple standpoints has interested modern logicians. And the argument that the moral circle should include all sentient beings, made in India two and a half thousand years ago and followed further there than almost anywhere, is the same argument now made in Western animal ethics, arrived at independently and much later.

The Indian tradition taught by Mahavira in the fifth century BC, and by twenty-three predecessors before him, holds that every living thing has an eternal soul, that karma is a physical residue that sticks to it through action driven by passion, and that liberation comes from restraint rather than from any god. Its five vows are led by non-violence, which extends to plants and microscopic beings and shapes diet, occupation and the practice of sweeping a path. It has about five million adherents, two main traditions, and an influence on Indian vegetarianism and on Gandhi that far exceeds its size.