Jain Journal 1990 04

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

Page 51

162
soul absorbs in the shape of nourishment, as a growing embryo, and with their agitations or vibrations mould the impregnated lump into shape and form. The symmetry of the limbs and form, the excellence and even the existence of the mind and brain, are thus directly dependent on the working of the store of the tendencies which one brings with one from one's previous life. Where the agitations are too violent, for instance, it may be taken that the excellence and symmetry of the mind and bodily organs will be impaired. This is just a mere indication of how the law of karma is put into operation to the advantage or disadvantage of an individual.
JAIN JOURNAL
Now my point is this that in order to impress a rational mind, like that of a modern boy or girl, you have got to convince him or her of the need for peacefulness and alter his or her emotional nature, destroying the element of savageness and barbarian greed from the heart. A rationally inclined mind can never, for all times, be impressed with dogma and ill-founded reason; and without the training and control of the emotions, it is not possible to make a man a real lover of peace. And the test of the real love of peace is that one should cheerfully offer one's cloak also when one's coat is claimed at law.
The need for the giving away of the cloak over and above the coat will become more clrearly impressed on the mind if we remember that many people and nations are now sitting tight over the properties and rights of others. Do you think you have a right to dream of Universal Peace unless these peoples and nations have that restored to them first which has been taken from them? Do you even think that you are honest in talking of such a peace when you do not begin by handing back the spoils and the loot ? Let me tell you as a student of human nature that no amount of soft words and platitudes and pious wishes will ever mend matters. All talk of mutual understandings and all that sort of things, too, is a pure wasting of breath ?1 There is only one thing that can be effective, and that is renunciation which will compel the robber to restore what he has taken from his victim, the grabber to refund what he has grabbed from another, and the imposer of a yoke to remove it from the neck of the people on whom he has placed it. But such renunciation is only possible for him whose heart becomes saturated with the doctrine of mercy and love, that is ahimsa, and who feels compelled, by an internal longing, all his own, to put it into practice at once.
1 Do not the victimizer and the victim, the ruler and the ruled, the bleeder and the bled understand each other already more than sufficiently?