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Lecture I
THE JAINA ETHICAL TRADITION AND ITS RELEVANCE
DR G C PANDE
The Sources of Ethical Tradition
Any ethical tradition is rooted at once in belief as well as in practice, drawing its sustenance from the consciousness of values affecting the exercise of will, from the experience of social action and institutions and from the reflective consideration and analysis of such effort and experience Although at the collective level moral belief and practice rarely coincide, it is an essential fact of moral life that practice should seek to attain an ideal in an infinite seeking Moral life presupposes the notion of an ideal which motivates action and unfolds itself with such action endlessly This active moral life is pursued in the midst of institutionalized norms of action and cultural values which place the individual psyche within a world of compulsions and obligations Socially projected obligations can neither be disregarded nor wholly identified with the true obligations of moral seeking While working in and through traditional obligations and institutions, the consciousness of the individual must discover the source of its moral motivation in its own universal and ideal nature and this discovery in the nature of the case must be a perpetually progressive discovery What is more, such a moral endeavour on the part of the individual must lead him to reinterpret, readjust and ultimately to seek to change traditional institutions so as bring them in harmony with growing moral experience Whether such a growth of moral experience takes place on the socio-historical plane and, even if it does in some sense, whether that growth is uniform or linear, are vexed historical questions, into which it is unnecessary to go What is relevant is that moial action occurring at the level
