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294 THE EMPTY HEART OF JAINISM
Karma and
Instead of a God delighting in mercy, who rules and transmi- judges the fair world that He has made, the Jaina have gration. set in His place a hideous thing, the accumulated energy of past actions, karma, which can no more be affected by love or prayer than a runaway locomotive. On and on it goes, remorselessly dealing out mutilation and suffering, till the energy it has amassed is at last exhausted and a merciful silence follows. The belief in karma and transmigration kills all sympathy and human kindness for sufferers, since any pain a man endures is only the wages he has earned in a previous birth. It is this belief that is responsible amongst other things for the suffering of the thousands of child widows in India, who are taught that they are now reaping the fruit of their unchastity in a former life. There is no conscious justice in this solution, for how can a man possibly accept a sentence as righteous, when he does not even know for what he is being tried and has no recollection of ever committing the crime?
Much, however, as the Jaina find to admire in Christianity, one of their tenets, that of Ahimsā, casts for them a great shadow across the Christian faith: they feel that the followers of Christ are stained with the sin of animal murder, and until this feeling is removed, they will never really understand the beauty of our religion.
One would like to remind them first of the quite elementary fact that a great many Christians are actually vegetarians, and that no Christian is under any obligation to eat meat; in fact the great missionary apostle expressly said, 'If meat maketh my brother to stumble, I will eat no flesh for evermore '.1 Not as though there were any sin in eating or in not eating meat. Jesus Christ, realizing that there were enough real sins already in the world, created no artificial ones by laying down ritual regulations for His followers to govern the details of their daily lives. But though He gave them no narrow code of rules, as though they had been 1 1 Cor. viii. 13.
Ahimsā.
