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WORLDVIEWS AND ECOLOGY
TOBIAS: JAINISM AND ECOLOGY
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Once that ecological meditation, that Jain summoning of feeling, has begun, there is no turning back.
"Khamemi sabbajive sabbe jiva khamantu me metti me sabbabhuyesu veram majjha na kenavi"
These words of a Digambara monk were spoken to me in the temple village of Taranga, meaning, "I forgive all beings, may all beings forgive me. I have friendship toward all, malice toward
none."
Notes
Jains have sought to protect the wildness in everyone; to reinstate the dignity and original purpose of the wilderness; to reconnect with the nature in everything-but to do so with absolute nonviolence. This imposes a colossal gymnasatic on all thought and behavior. Jainism has undertaken to walk that tightrope. What is remarkable is its delicate balance.
To argue, as many have done, that animals and insects kill one another, an implicit challenge to the high hopes of Jainism, is to ignore the great Jain calling which recognizes violence in nature but vehemently insists that human beings, and other animals as well, have the ability to reverse what is pernicious in the world, to celebrate and coddle, to love and nurture. It does not matter whether one accepts the premise that the animal world is a Hobbesian maelstrom of aggressive genes and self-defense, of hedonistic impulses and only rare instances of kin altruism. For the Jains, inherited or not, it is our responsibility as feeling, thinking beings to make loving the preferred medium of exchange on earth.
Because the Jains have so acutely examined the violence everywhere endemic to nature, they have systematically retreated into communities that are typically densely populated. Jain ascetics do not live in caves far removed from others. They depend upon city and village lay Jains for their food and sustenance. It means that there is no "wilderness tradition" among the Jains, no agricultural or pastoral reveries, no sense of solitary poets and monastic mists. Instead, the Jains are gregarious, living off the land, but doing so according to a pattern of minimal consumption, minimalist impact, and discrete movement and presence. In no other religion or way of life has the ideal been so extreme. But what is striking and uncanny is that ideal's accessibility to individuals.
In one of many such stories, it is said that Mahavira, in a former life, was a lion who—upon speaking with a Jain monk-resolved to die of hunger rather than harm any other living being. And upon his death, was immediately reborn the 24th Tirthankara. We may well pass on without having learned many answers, but the same questions of a life-force with which Jainism is preeminently concerned will always prevail. Such questions concern the universal decency and the possibilities for joy and empathy which are our responsibility to engender as compassionate, rational individuals confronted by a sea of tumultuous evolution. The soul of Jainism is thus about stewardship, requiring human diligence, human conscience, and human love. Jain ecology is nothing more than universal love (mettim bhavehi).
This essay is an adaptation of the author's piece, "The Soul of Jainism," in Michael Tobias, Environmental Meditation (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1993).
1. Excerpt from the teachings of the Jinas, in Jyoti Prasad Jain, Religion and Culture of the Jains (New Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanpith, 1983), 187.
2. And this minimizing of violence includes one's speech. See, for example, the first Anga, the Acaranya Sutra (book 2, lecture 4, lesson 2) in Jaina Sutras, Part 1, trans. Hermann Jacobi (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980). 152-56: Mahavira has written that monks or nuns must use a sinless language when describing nature. Trees should be described as "magnificent." "noble." When speaking of wild fruits, the monk or nun should never say, "They are ripe, they should be cooked or eaten, they are just in season, or soft, or they have just split," in as much as these are invocations to destroy such fruit. Similarly, with regard to vegetables, Mahavira writes, "A monk or a nun, seeing many vegetables, should not speak about them in this way: "They are ripe, they are dark coloured, shining, fit to be fried or roasted or eaten." Instead, the monk or nun should say, "They are grown up, they are fully grown, they are strong, they are excellent, they are run to seed, they have spread their seed, they are full of sap." In other words, they should be left alone, to be enjoyed as miracles in and of themselves, free to be souls, free to evolve
If the monk wishes to "eat or suck one half of a mango or a mango's peel or rind or sap or smaller particles" the monk may only do so if the fruit is free from eggs, is injured, and has been nibbled at already by other animals. The same holds for sugar cane, and nearly every wild fruit or vegetable that is allowed. The very willingness to eat, under circumscribed conditions, hinges strictly upon the monk's recognition that not to eat some thing is suicide, which is also the infliction of pain. Nevertheless, that something must be minimal (ibid., lecture 7. lesson 2, pp. 173-77).
"The extent to which such ethical delineation proceeds is even to be noted in the twentyone rules which occasion the wandering monk's defecation. For example, in keeping with current park and wilderness regulations, "a monk or a nun should not ease nature at sacred places near rivers, marshes or ponds, or in a conduit." In relieving themselves, the monk or nun-and by inference, all human beings-must avoid harming shrubs, vegetables, or roots, and any places which contain leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, or sprouts (ibid., lecture 2, pp. 120-35). In the Kalpasutra (117) it is stated that Mahavira "was selfrestrained in his way.faring, his speech and his desires, as well as in holding and rightly
