Sambodhi 1973 Vol 02

SR No.: 520752
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Dalsukh Malvania, H C Bhayani
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad
Publication Year: 1973
Total Pages: 417
Language: English, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Gujarati
Classification: Magazine, India_Sambodhi, & India
File Size: 14 MB

Page 216

The Problems of Ethics and Karma
level-and ten additional vows',12 These 'ten additional vows of a monk' do not occur in the classical Jaina authors' treatment of the problem (certainly not in Umasvati's treatment of it). This perhaps suggests that the passage, though late, is not too much so.
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Lastly, one more aspect of the Bhagavatt dialogues dealing wih ethical problems deserves consideration. The oldest Jaina authors discussed the problem of world-renunciation in the background of concrete social conditions. Thus they would argue that a life of worldly success is a life of all sinfulness from which the corollary emerged that a life free from all sin can only be a life of world-renunciation. To employ their own technical terminology, parigraha or acquisitiveness stood for all wordly attachment, arambha or violence for all sinfulness. In the Bhagavati discussion of ethical problems, however, such wakefulness to the social side of the situation is conspicuous by its almost total absence. Thus here vlolence always means violence practised by a man against an animal-or against the particles of earth, water, fire and air, but never that practised by a man against another man. It is only once that we hear of a man killing another man but the circumstance is somewhat odd-at least unusual 13 For we are here asked that if at the same time when a person shoots arrow at an animal and kills it another person kills this person himself then who is guilty of violence in relation to whom; the answer obviously is that the first person is guilty of violence in relation to the animal, the second person guilty of violence in relation to the first person. But it is equally obvious that such a discussion throws no light on the social question of man's violence against man. The classical Jaina authors undertook some sort of discussion of the social side of ethical problems when they took up for consideration the householder's twelve dutles, but Bhagavatt has not yet reached this historical stage of evolution and it has already crossed that oldest historical stage when social questions were discussed in connection with a treatment of the monk's duties and when the question of the householder's duties had not at all appeared on the thought-horizon of the Jaina authors.
The Bhagavatt treatment of the problems of karma-doctrine has Its own value. In this connection a peculiar verbal usage of the text deserves notice. Thus when it intends to say that a person commits a kriya (kriyanı karoti) it sometimes says that this person is touched by this kriya (kriyaya Sprstah).14 Certainly, the phrase 'touched by kriya' used here is somewhat odd but it sems to have been patterned after a popular phrase of those times. For in the dialogue considering the case of one person killing an animal and another person killing this person himself we are told that the first person is touched by the enmity of the animal (mrgavairena sprstaḥ),