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The Heritage of the Last Arhat
65
The acknowledgement of the Law of Karma as the commonest of all natural laws (the law of conservation of forces, as it were, in its application to the psychical sphere ) culminates in the glorification of the Principle of Ahimsā, i.e., Non-injury, in Jainism. For, according to the law of Karma, a living being that causes a fellow-creature, even the lowest developed one, to suffer, be it in order to further its own advantage, or for any other reason, cannot do so without harming its own soul, i.e., without tumbling down a greater or smaller distance from the height of inner development it has reached, and without experiencing, earlier or later, as a mechanical consequence, a disturbance of its own harmonious equilibrium. What means suffering to one, can never be a source of real joy to another, and wherever it appears to be so, it is because our means of perception hinder us from being aware of the slow, but sure effectiveness of this Law of 'Eternal Justice'. This explains why the saying, "Ahimsā paramo dharmaḥ", i.e., 'Non-injury is the highest of all religious principles', acts such an important part in the daily life of the religiously inspired Jaina, whose sensible heart, a psychical galvanometer, as it were, warns him of every disturbance of well-being in the community of fellow-creatures around him, and spontaneously causes him to insert the resistance of self-control in the circuit of his own activity, or to restrain that of others in its proper course.
Strictly speaking, of all the religions that acknowledge of law of Karma in one shape or another, i.e., practically of all the Indo-Aryan religions, it is Jainism with its all-comprising doctrine of soul, in which the principle of Ahimsā has got the highest theoretical as well as practical importance, and where its place is substantiated more logically than anywhere else. Moreover, Jainism (unlike various other religious systems ) does not believe the soul to be completely helpless in its dependence on Karma, i.e., to be hopelessly condemned to act and react, like an automation, upon the consequences of its former deeds, and to be therefore beyond all
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