Jainism in a Global Perspective - Collection of Jain papers of 1993 Parliament of World Religions, Chicago

SR No.: 014010
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Sagarmal Jain, Shreeprakash Pandey
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith
Publication Year: 1998
Total Pages: 402
Language: English
Classification: Seminar & Articles
File Size: 23 MB

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Jainism in a Global Perspective
Although the physical traces of this incursion have long since disappeared, the greed it engendered and the violence it wrought have become encoded upon the American psyche with continuing deleterious effects. Lopez comments as follows:
This incursion, this harmful road into the 'New World, quickly became a ruthless, angry search for wealth, It set a tone in the Americas. The quest for personal possessions was...to be, from the outset, a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it--- the slaves, the timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and later, arable land, coal, oil, and iron ore--- was never visible, in which an end to it had no meaning. The assumption of an imperial right conferred by God, Sanctioned by the state, and enforced by a militia; the assumption of unquestioned superiority over a resident people, based not on morality but on race and cultural comparison--- or, let me say it plainly, on ignorance, on a fundamental illiteracy --- the assumption that one is due wealth in North America, reverberates in the journals of people on the Oregon Trail, in the public speeches of nineteenth-century industrialists, and in twentieth-century politics. You can hear it today in the rhetric of timber barons in my home state of Oregon, standing before the last of the old-growth forest, irritated that anyone is saying 'enough...... it is enough."
It is difficult to imagine the unfoldment of a history more completely at variance with ahiṁsā either in principle or in practice. As Dr. L.M. Singhvi states in The Jaina Declaration of Nature, "All the Arhatas (Venerable Ones) of the past, present and future discourse, counsel, proclaim, propound and prescribe thus in unison : Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture or kill any creature of living being." The contemporary routinization or violence in the United states, including riots in Los Angeles, murder and addiction in environments both urban and rural, economic powerlessness suffered by some ethnic groups and crimes perpetrated against women, men and children, is the cumulative result of centuries of conditioning to the idea that a certain level of violence is not only acceptable but inevitable. Add to this the