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If we look at a couple of the sayings of Mahavira we find thoughts that might very well have been born during Thoreau's retreat on the banks of Walden Pond.
In Walden we find :
"Happy are we, happy live we, who call nothing our own. The more you get, the more you want; your desires increase with your means."2
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"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand."
The awareness of the transitory nature of life and of the importance of making use of the here-and-now is expressed thus by Mahavira :
Thoreau is not careless:
• Ibid., p. 68.
"You cannot prolong your life, therefore be not careless; you are past help when old age approaches."4
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."'5
Time is of the essence to all men; Thoreau and Mahavira are no exceptions. Again from Walden :
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is."'6
2 Mahavira, The Sayings of Lord Mahavira (Aliganj, U.P. India: World Jain Mission) P. 7.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden-Civil Disobedience, ed. Sherman Paul, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960) p. 63.
'Mahavira, p. 6.
Thoreau, p. 62.
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