Jain Spirit 2003 10 No 16

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 45

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True Friendship
AUROTRUE 88A9 A FRIENDSHIP
Manshi M. Shah analyses the nature of friendship
try to understand the true nature of the soul.
THAT IS FRIENDSHIP? How do we make friends? Why do we choose certain people to get close to and maintain distance from others? Let's go back to that first day at school or university when we saw new faces, new people. We smiled at a few and chose not to respond to others. Soon we started interacting and made a few good friends with whom we always wanted to be together. Why did we get close to those selected few? Because somewhere our ideas met, somewhere we thought we could share and talk, we grew closer and proceeded to gradually build a rapport with them. Why did we choose them in particular when we met for the first time? Was it only appearance? Or was there some bond already existing between us? I believe that the answer to this latter question is: "Yes, there was." It is the karma, good or bad, accumulated in previous lives that determine who we are to meet in the present life; when we have generated good karma, we meet people who are good to us.
Friendship is a relationship we form by choice, unlike family ties that we are born into. Jainism teaches that a true friend will always try to stop us from doing wrong things, but it is up to us whether we take the advice or ignore it. Jain philosophy also teaches us that our soul is our closest and truest friend: if we understand and foresee what we are doing, we do not need anyone else to tell us what is right or wrong. Conversely, when we do not know what we are doing, or when we keep on doing the wrong things, we become our own worst enemy because we do not
Photo: Dinodia
Jainism provides two key perspectives on being friends: one is friendship (shatrutva) and the other is
Friendship requires trust
friendliness (maitribhav). Friendship means choosing the people we like from amongst a host of other acquaintances to be our friends. Friendliness, on the other hand, is choosing none and treating everybody the same; it means not favouring some while neglecting others. In friendship there are expectations and when these are not fulfilled, we tend to hold the other party in poor regard and might even develop feelings of enmity for
them. However, in friendliness we are all equal and we have no expectations from any particular soul. We are not biased so we have no enmity.
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We are often told that it is essential to respect our elders. Thinking about it from a Jain perspective, universal friendliness means that we should extend this respect to all living beings. Age is not the only thing that is important; rather it is the qualities of a person that are most important. One who recognises and appreciates the qualities in another, probably also has the same qualities within himself. We become biased when we have respect only for a certain set of people but when we respect everyone, become equal to all. In friendship, the qualities of trust, love, affection, respect and morality are important, but the most important is the sense of detachment. All friends are attached to each other in one way or another because there is an emotional bond. between them. However, this attachment has to be detachable as we have to accept that one who comes into our life also has to go some day. Lacking this ability we hinder the other person - our friend - from progressing in life and, in turn, we hurt ourselves.
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Manshi Shah (Gholani) is a young Jain living and studying in Mumbai, India.com anbile
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September November 2003 Jain Spirit
43