Book Title: Introduction to Jainism and its Culture
Author(s): Balbhadra Jain
Publisher: Kundkund Gyanpith Indore

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Page 149
________________ Attitude - Eating meat enhances feelings of cruelty, callousness, brutality, and selfishness. A non-vegetarian is harsh towards a being writhing in pain. Wars are born out of such cruelty. The mental bearing of people will have to be made simple, compassionate and sensitive in order to achieve world peace. This is possible if vegetarianism gets universal recognition. Therefore, non-vegetarian diet in any form including egg, meat, or fish should be censured under all conditions. Fish and egg are also meat and entail same faults as eating flesh. Therefore, it is necessary to avoid these too. CENSURE OF ALCOHAL onar : Drinking alcohal is intoxicating. An inebriated person forgets his religion and duty and does not hesitate to indulge in violence. Alcohal is, in fact, a distillate produced by juices of beings (produced in fermentation). Therefore, producing alcohal involves killing all those beings. Thus drinking wine is essentially an act of grave violence. A man looses his senses when he is drunk. He has no sense of what is good or bad for him and what he should or should not do. For all practical purpose he becomes incoherent and helpless. In such condition he indulges in grave misdeeds like creating disturbance, having a fight and other such violent acts. And he him-self has to bear grave consequences. Deprived of his reason he indulges in misconduct. In anger he goes to the extent of committing murder. Under the influence of inflamed lust he indulges in lechery and visits prostitutes. For woman and wine he requires money. This leads him to stealing. To multiply what he has he indulges in gambling and other vices including eating meat. Thus he gets entrapped in such a vicious circle of vices that he ends up in a prison and spends a larger part of his life there. Alcohal is not just a juice extracted from living beings; it gets infested with innumerable living beings even later. Religious and historical texts are filled with instances of disputes, struggles, misconduct, loosing wealth, and destruction caused by alcohalism but it is difficult to find even one instance where some 132 Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

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