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70
THE JAINA GAZETTE
involve very substantial curtailments of personal liberty.. One may for instance have more than a little fancy for a particular kind of food, innocuous in itself, but because your body has an idiosyncrasy against that special article of diet its consumption by you will result in actual discomfort or even worse. To avoid the displeasure or harm of your bodily reactions you will as a reasonable and prudent person restrain your natural desire to eat the food. One might multiply instances without any difficulty. All stages of education involve grinding toil, especially the early ones. The student must be master of the elements before he can indulge his enquiring mind in the fanciful realms of advanced knowledge with its exquisitely balanced pros and cons, bewildering complications and amazingly interesting and intriguing problems. In personal relationships, too, the stamp of sacrifice or denial is too plainly recognised to require ela horation. All achievement may be said to involve restriction in some direction or another. It is an axiom of life that pain, used in that sense, is the law of growth. It is equally true that indulgence spells the death of happiness and all things good.
Here then comes the necessity of distinguishing between mere negation and the more positive aspects of control and regulation. The first is a nothingness before which all effort wilts and fades; the other is the travail of the spirit in reaching after the things of good report. Neither has anything in common with the other. Jainism and vegetarianism do not stand for the exposition of a series of lifeless negations and soul-deadening taboos. On the contrary they have in them all the vigour and vitality of positive precepts which engender right thinking and of a mode of living which impels one to right conduct.
So much it has been necessary to make clear at the outset in order that a false conception shall not oncumber the ground. For, as Mr. Jain has so admirably said in his engrossing work“ What is Jainism "?—“A Jaina's life, from the very moments of his birth, is one of giving up" (page 121).
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
