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JAINISM AND WORLD PROBLEMS
sitting tight over the properties and rights of others. Do you think you have a right to dream of Universal Peace unless these peoples and nations have that restored to them first which has been taken from them? Do you even think that you are honest in talking of such a peace when you do not begin by handing back the spoils and the loot? Let me tell you as a student of human nature that no amount of soft words and platitudes and pious wishes will ever mend matters. All talk of mutual understandings and all that sort of things, too, is a pure wasting of breath.* There is only one thing that can be effective, and that is renunciation which will compel the robber to restore what he has taken from his victim, the grabber to refund what he has grabbed from another, and the imposer of a yoke to remove it from the neck of the people on whom he has placed it. But such renunciation is only possible for him whose heart becomes saturated with the doctrine of mercy and love, that is ahimsa, and who feels compelled, by an internal longing, all his own, to put it into practice at once.
Why certain religions failed to maintain peace even among their followers in the past was because they failed to eradicate excessive greed and pride and lust from the hearts of their followers, who repeated the scriptural text that enjoins the practising of love all right enough, but allowed it to be swept away from the mind by their rising passions, greed and pride and lust. In fact, certain religions directly fostered fanaticism itself.
Modern education is also not able to encompass the curbing down of the surging savage emotions and strong lust. They are beyond its scope and programme, as a matter of fact. The root of ethics with the moderns is only the social well-being of the community ; individual good is bound
Do not the victimizer and the victim, the ruler and the ruled, the bleeder and the bled understand cach other already more than sufficiently!
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