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SACRIFICE KUMARPAL, the worthy king of Gujarat, had made nonviolence the principle of his life and he cherished a vision of enlightening a world overhung with the pall of violence, by means of the luminous light of nonviolence. It was the all-wise Acharya Shree Hemachandra who had inspired him with this dream. :
Kumarpal tried his first experiment of nonviolence in Gujarat and Saurashtra. Because of his preaching of nonviolence here, even people from the lower castes recoiled at the very name of flesh at a time when even Brahmins in other parts of India, such as Bengal and Orissa did not hesitate to partake of meat. The purifying waters of the principle of respect for all living things had seeped even into the lowest stratum of people, as far as Rajputana.
Kumarpal of Gujarat was once faced with a problem. It was a custom in his family over long years to offer animal sacrifices to the family goddess Kanteshwari every year on the festival of NavaRatri. How was he going to stop this slaughter of hundreds of goats and buffaloes offered as sacrifice to the goddess, without moving her to wrath and consequent punishment?
As the festival of the goddess drew nearer, the warriors, noted for their intrepidity, began to feel uneasy. They had always felt secure under the
