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Jaina Philosophy and Religion
that of health, that of medicine and surgery, that of food have made innumerable experiments and brought to light many discoveries. Jainism which is regarded as a scientific religion cannot afford to ignore the beneficial aspect of these discoveries.
Body is the foremost means or instrument of righteous conduct, religious practice and spiritual development and thereby ultimately of liberation. So it is absolutely necessary to see that it maintains its efficiency all right and remains quite healthy. It is better to form such habits of food and drink that the body may remain sound and healthy and gain required strength and energy to resist the attacks of diseases than to form bad habits and subject the body to medical treatment after diseases have already attacked it. Prevention is better than cure. For this purpose, one should reflect as to which food is wholesome and which one is unwholesome, discreetly select the wholesome one that can provide nutritive juices to the body for its health and supplement the loss which the body suffers everyday.
One should assiduously abandon the food and drink which involve killing of mobile creatures, cause intoxication and unconsciousness leading to deviation from duty and to loathsome behaviour, are injurious to health, instead of increasing nutritive juices and helping proper secretion of fluids excite nerves and mental activities relating to them and thereby cause fatigue, weakness and deterioration of the body, are unnecessary and make their users addictive to them, cause no benefit except giving pleasures of taste and relish, and whose properties are not known to us. Similarly, from the religious standpoint, even for the purpose of bodily growth or for that of the cure of a disease, one should not take such medicines or tonics as are prepared from liver, etc., of the mobile creatures after killing them, because their use encourages the business of killing animals. Meat-eating is a very reprehensible and contemptible act, it being a form of intense violence and should be abandoned by all always.
Even though plants do have subtle life, we cannot live without depending on them for our food. Again, vegetable substances form a natural food and do not contain filthy things (like blood, etc.) at all. So by eating this natural and pure food, man is not defiled by the defect of violence, nor is he guilty of it. Nature itself has allowed him to use the immobile one-sensed beings (earth, water, light, air, plants) for his bare necessities of life. His use of them is natural and unsullied. He should not use living beings having more sense-organs than one. The destruction of the higher
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