Jain Journal 1974 01

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 32

116
JAIN JOURNAL
pleasure in the chase, and by beat of drum forbade throughout his vast kingdom the taking of life. Kumarapaladeva withdrew from hunters, fowlers, and even fishermen their licenses, and compelled them to adopt other avocations that were in agreement with the great principle of causing no harm to living beings. The king ordered that only filtered water was to be given to the animals employed in the royal army. When a Bani of Sambhar (which province in Rajputana had been conquered by Kumarapaladeva) had been caught killing a louse, he was brought in chains to Anahilavada. On another occasion a woman of Nador in Marwar had offered flesh to a field-god (Kșetrapāla). At this her husband was put to death by Khelna, the chief of Nador in order to escape the wrath of the great king. What Asoka, the Buddhist, had failed to do, Kumarapaladeva, the Jaina, did. Ahimsā was not only made the corner-stone of the edifice of the State but was made to cover the existence of even the fishes in the ocean. Asoka the Great had lived the life of a Buddhist almost in vain ; the sad condition of the Mauryan capital and the Empire soon after his death does not warrant the saying that he had succeded in planting firmly the tree of ahimsā for ever in the land. But Kumarapala, the illustrious, not only successfully lived the life of a devout Jaina but handed down to the country the glorious gospel of ahimsā which centuries afterwards another celebrated son of Gujarat was to hold aloft as the beacon light of India's Freedom. The credit of thus converting a negative axiom of non-killing into a positive one of life and progress must go to the great Hemcandracarya whose vast learning was eclipsed by his more profound sense of the realism lying behind the principle of ahimsā.
Reprinted from Acarya Bhiksu Commemoration Volume.
78 Indraji, op. cit., p. 193.