Jain Moral Doctrine

Author(s): Harisatya Bhattacharya
Publisher: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal

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JAIN MORAL DOCTRINE
trol of the sexual passions). Coming again to the primal or the cardinal virtues, the śrīmad-bhāgvatam of the Vedic school states them as 'All pious practices which are included in the four--Ahimsā (abstinence from killing), Satya (truthfulness), Asteya (non-stealing) and Maithunavarjana (controlling of the sex-passions)'. The Suttanipāta of the Buddhists enumerates the Pança-bila as follows: (1) Do not kill nor encourage others to kill. (2) Do not steal nor encourage others to steal. (3) Control your sexual passions and make others to do so. (4) Do not tell a lie and see that others also do not lie. (5) Abstain from drinking and instruct others also to that effect. We shall have occasions to deal in some details with the Mahāvratas or the fundamental acts of morality according to the Jaina's; here we may point out that these are Ahimsā or doing injury to none, Satya or truthfulness, Aparigraha or a spirit of nonattachment, Asteya or non-stealing and Brahmaçarya or the control of the sexual passions.
The above substantial unanimity among the various schools regarding the subjective aspect as well as the objective contents of the acts of morality raises the point as to why an act is deemed as morally right and accepted as something which we ought to do. In other words, the question that requires solution is: What is the criterion of the moral value of a practice,—the test of a 'moral worth', as we otherwise call it? Ordinarily, all our acts are with reference to, i.e., in connection with, a thing or phenomenon, external to us; we move ourselves either to appropriate an outside object or just to avoid it and, roughly speaking, all our acts are determined by the nature of that extraneous phenomena. While this is true, it does not mean that the nature of the external object has an intrinsic moral character of its own. An act presupposes certainly an external thing but the moral worth of the act does not emanate from the intrinsic nature of that object; it depends upon a relation between a subject and the object. The object outside is practically colourless, so to say. This is clear from the fact that the same object arouses moral activities in one individual while it may give rise to tendencies in another individual which are dubbed as immoral. Moral judgments are passed not on external objects but on the movements of an individual in connection with them.
This absolutely unmoral character of the external phenomena in and by themselves disposes of the basic position of the evolutionists of the school of Spencer and others. While these thinkers acknowledge the reality of the intuitive moral ideas in us, they offer an exogenic account of their origin. They admit that