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JAINA CONVENTION 2011
"Live and Help Live"
very less compared to elsewhere). They world, the quicker it reforms and also oppose the institutionalized breeding transforms itself, the better for our planet. and killing of animals, birds, and fish for While the West continues to crave more human consumption. Just this month of natural resources without changing its May 2011, my book is published based on lifestyle, it will continue to lack the moral my research with three communities in authority to preach to other cultures. It India and the diaspora with several was the West who led the world with its ecological practices inspired by the Indic modern scientific and technological traditions.
innovations for the last several centuries.
It will have to be the West who emerges Although yoga is widely known in the as a new ecological leader, with Gandhi as West, what is not so widely known is that the foundation of its lifestyle. All voices to yoga is a system of eight "limbs" or save the planet's ecology are hollow components. The very first step of the first rhetoric until that happens. limb of yoga is ahimsa. Unless one is firmly rooted in ahimsa in one's thoughts, There cannot be and should not be speech, and actions, true practice of yoga separate "war on terrorism", "war on cannot begin. In addition, since Gandhi climate change", "war on drugs", "war on was a dedicated practitioner of ahimsa corruption", "war on obesity", and so on. (and other yogic principles), he can be Our physical, mental, and spiritual health, called a great yogi even though he might the environment, the global security and not have practiced all the stretching international peace, social justice, it seems exercises that we commonly refer to as like everything will get a great boost if we yoga. It is this practice of yoga that first become non-violent in our most basic develops one's harmony with and activity: eating and surviving. "We are reverence for nature in which even a cobra what we eat", it is such a simple is not to be killed.
statement and yet is so widely ignored all
over the world. This is the way Gandhi When I first mentioned this to my own lived everyday and his protest against the students recently, one immediately imperial power was influential because it questioned me and asked if Indians in was based on his own great life unlike India are not following the principles of many contemporary activists whose own Gandhi, how can we expect others? | lives are nowhere close to the Gandhi's. partially agreed with her. India (and many Gandhi's entire life can be seen as an other emerging nations in the world) is ecological treatise. This is one life in which enthusiastically aping the West with its every minute act, emotion or thought ever-expanding economy and ever- functioned much like an ecosystem: his shrinking natural resources. I was also small meals of nuts and fruits, his morning asked recently at a conference on World ablutions and everyday bodily practices, Religions and Ecology, what do the non- his periodic observances of silence, his Western countries expect of the Western morning walks, his cultivation of the small countries? If the rest of the world is eager as much as of the big, his spinning wheel, to make the same mistakes as the West his abhorrence of waste, his resorting to did, what route should the West now take basic Hindu and Jain values of truth, to ensure the planet's survival? Perhaps, nonviolence, celibacy and fasting. The one answer could be to embrace Gandhi moralists, nonviolent activists, feminists, and his ecological practices. If the West is journalists, social reformers, trade union to remain the intellectual leader of the leaders, peasants, prohibitionists, nature
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