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OCTOBER, 1981
Complimentary to this is Mahavira's saying:
"Time is the cause of the shortening of the duration of life as well as of wealth; the amassers of wealth love money more than their lives."""
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Many are the parallels to be drawn between Thoreau and the Indian sage. Some one might object that Thoreau certainly wouldn't have swept ants from his path. Perhaps so; nevertheless he exhibited the same reverence for ants as did Mahavira, albeit in a different way, when he carefully recorded their activities in Walden.
Was Thoreau secretly a Jainist? It is unlikely that, in this case, there was any cultural transference. However, one thing is certain, and that is that the impact of both Thoreau and Mahavira brought about nonviolent change in the world; Gandhi, for example, was both a Jainist and an admirer of Thoreau. The non-violent teachings he gleaned from Jainism and Civil Disobedience were woven into the very fabric of his life. The holy life he led had a profound effect on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who also lived in the spirit of Mahavira and Thoreau.
Thoreau, Emerson wrote, "inferred universal law from the single fact". Mahavira said that "he who knows one thing knows all things"." What was this "one thing", this "single fact" ? Basically it was reverence for life; we see it in the pacifism and vegetarianism of the two men, in Thoreau's praises of a single flower, in Mahavira's declaration that even that single flower has a spark of Divinity, in both men's contempt for the use of the gun or the trap, and in the general inoffensiveness of their manner. This reverence for life is what ethics is all about. After accepting this fact we can say of Mahavira and Thoreau that they were "aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well".10 No secondhand life spent at cocktail parties etc. was good enough for them; they demanded nothing less than the Source of life Himself.
"Mahavira, p. 9.
R. W. Emerson, Thoreau, Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. R.L.Cook, (N. Y. : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950), p. 309.
Matthew McKay, Jain Laws Explained, (Aliganj: The World Jain Mission, 1964) P. 7.
10 Emerson, p. 296.
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