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106
faina Ethics
most heart of being non-injurious to others, we are to fix our duty of non-violence. Non-violence in Jainism :
Thought is the father of action. We commit violence in thought (bhāvahimsā) before we commit it in action dravyahińsā). It is the former, violence in thought, which is real violence (niścayahiṁsā). Therefore, merely taking away of life does not constitute complete definition of violence. Violence has been defined as injury to one's vitalities out of negligence (pramāda). Negligence means, in short, the passionate ideas of attachment and aversion. These ideas have been classified under fifteen heads. Entertaining such ideas is violence, whereas absention from such ideas is non-violence.?
Violence in thought
Bhāvahiṁsā, violence in thought, has predominated in the discussion of ahimsā by Jaina thinkers. Even before Umāsvāti defined himsā, Ācārya Kundakunda had declared that whether one was killed or not, a negligent person certainly committed violence. A vigilant person, on the other hand, who acted with care, did not suffer bondage by mere (material) injury. The commentator Amrtacandrācārya says that the inner violence is the impure state of self, whereas the injury to vitalities is the external manifestation of violence. He is clear about it that the material vitalities of others are sometimes injured and sometimes not; a person gets the bondage of karmans because of defilement of his abstract vitalities (bhāvaprāna) by attachment. Jayasenācārya made the sense clearer by means of a metaphor. "Just as a person desirous of killing others by a burning iron bar burns his ownself first, similarly an ignorant person first afflicts his own pureself by getting influenced by the ideas of infatuation etc., which are like the burning iron bar; there is no rigid rule
1. Supra, p. 62. 2. Puruşārthasiddhyupāya, 44. 3. Pravacanasāra, 3.17., also Puruşārthasiddhyupāya, 45. 4. Amrtacandra on Pravacanasāra, 3.17. 5. Ibid., 2.57.
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