Agarchand Nahta Abhinandan Granth Part 2

Author(s): Dashrath Sharma
Publisher: Agarchand Nahta Abhinandan Granth Prakashan Samiti

Page 132

fill, putting restrictions on the use of certain items of food, and renouncing delicacies : in fact, he is to eat to live but not live to eat. Of course these auste rities are intended only for those who are sufficiently advanced on the path of religious life.
This doctrine of non-injury has led the Jaina Teachers to study in detail the whole range of the animal world and to classify the various living beings under different grades according to their development ane sense-faculties. This was a practical necessity. If injury to living being is to be avoided gradually, it was necessary to study what the various living beings are and how they stand graded. Living beings fall into two broad classes, Trasa or mobile and Sthāvara or immobile. Trasa beings are those which possess two, three, four and five sense-organs. Sthāvara beings are those which have cnly one sense-organ, namely, that of touch, and they are of five kinds : earth-bodied, water-bodied, fire-bodied, air-bodied, and vegetables. Jaina Teachers had realized long back that plants had life, and they had treated them as one-sensed beings.
When the Jaina Teachers studied the animate world in such detail, complete abstinence from injury to beings, in a strict sense, was practically impossible. Naturally every individual could not avoid injury to living beings in an absolute sense. The religious devotees, according to Jainism, are broadly divided into two groups, namely, monks and householders, again with various stages in themselves. A monk observes the vow of Ahimsa in a very strict sense : in fact, he is not liable to any injury to living beings, even in their potentiality, in his diet. To put it plainly, he does not 'use in his food seeds which are capable of growing into plants. Thus a monk avoids all kinds of harm to livings being, both Trasa and Sthāvara.
The case of a house-holder is slightly different. He has social obligations and practical duties. Naturally according to his religious stage, he does his best and avoids injury to Trasa beings. It is not always possible for him to avoid injury to Sthavara beings. But even there he is ever struggling to see that he minimizes harm unto Sthāvara beings. Naturally in his diet he does not use such fruits, roots and Egreen vegetables as contain living organisms.
The above details make it abundantly clear that Jainism not only insists on strict vegetarian food, but even there those items of vegetarian stuff which involve harm unto subtle organisms are also to be avoided by a pious Jaina. Apart from its religious aspect, vegetarian food has its value in various ways. It is only a strict vegetarian that can assure himself that he is a cultured citizen who is not living at the cost of any other life in this commonwealth of animate beings. Further, the vegetarian diet is conducive to a dispassionate and balanced mind and a detached
इतिहास और पुरातत्त्व : ९५