Bhagavana Mahavira and his Relevance in Modern Times

Author(s): Narendra Bhanavat, Prem Suman Jain, V P Bhatt
Publisher: Akhil Bharat Varshiya Sadhumargi Jain Sangh

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Mahavira and His Relevance
Society simply could not endure in such an environment. A great deal of sympathy and mutual aid, affection and solicitude, sacrifice and devotion have always gone to the making of the family, the wider associations and of community as a whole. The point which it is sought to enforce here is that there has not been enough of them; that there has been too heavy an alloy of brute force and that the latter has to be eliminated to make room for a complete way of the social virtues. It must, in the second place, be brought home that there exists a necessary organic connection between the ethics of the so called individual life and the social environment. Individuality is a social affair; that is to say, personality is a social product. It is embedded in social adjustments. All human experience goes to prove that exhortation and persuasion are not enough to call forth the moral life on the community-wide scale. The seed requires an appropriate soil and atmospheric conditions which constitute the environment. That is the truth uuderlying the proposition that a life of real non-violence is possible for mankind as a whole only within a set or social institutions and practices that are based on nonviolence. The principle of non-violence, then, really implies that life should be elevated altogether from the plane of force to that of reason, persuasion, accommodation, tolerance and mutual service. Truthfulness (Satya) :
It will be observed that the principle of non-violence is closely allied to that of sincerity or truthfulness. It has been pointed out above that force from above evokes fraud from below. We have also seen that force is by itself frequently incapable of achieving the objective, that it entails too severe a strain and that it usually calls for the assistance of fraud or deception. This is the truth underlying the dictum that all is fair in war. War indeed includes stratagems of all possible kinds. It has under modern conditions become totalitarian dependent, that is to say, on a complete mobilization of intellectual, moral and material resources. The weight of armaments seems at first sight to crush public opinion into an irrelevance; but the totalitarian character of modern war really enhances the importance of public support and explains the assiduity with which the originised might of governments seeks to manufacture assent through psychologised propaganda at present. So, it has well been
said shat truth is the first casuality in war.
Compulsory primary education ranked as the most solid