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AHIMSĀ (NON-VIOLENCE) THE FOREMOST HALLMARK OF JAINISM
What Is Wrong With Himisā?
If we keep our eyes open and look around us, we cannot help noticing the huge incidence of violence that pervades the world in its most hideous and nefarious manifestation.
We must be shocked out of our reverie at the fact that 99.99 percent of this violence is man-made. The humankind has gone berserk. The world is beset with the killer instinct of the humans sharpened, many-fold, by the newer and newer means of destruction at its command. Be it the wars that rage amongst nations for political and economic reasons or the killing of the members of another creed in the name of religion or those of another race in the name of racial superiority or those of lesser species like the animals, birds and fishes for food or fun or the wanton destruction of the flora and fauna of any region in the name of progress or an unconcerned fouling of the environment, it is all violence in its most devastating forms. But are we so shocked? Each one of us must ask this question to oneself.
The humankind is drunk with the power bestowed upon it by its superior intellectual capacity as compared to other species that inhabit the planet Earth. The (so called) scientific and technological progress gives it the power of mass destruction, at times annihilating the complete species of living--beings. Many
