Lessons of Ahimsa and Anekanta for Contemporary Life

Author(s): Tara Sethia
Publisher: California State Polytechnic University Pomona

Page 32

Kim Skoog, "Jaina Response to Terrorism"
In addition to optimizing one's violent activities done during the war or response to terrorism, one must also strive to shed the accumulated papa through good activities leading to nirjara (removal of karmic matter through austerities) and samvara (repelling or stopping the inward flow of karma). Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that all of this "debt" could be removed in one's lifetime. While good deeds and austerities help remove some of the bad karma associated with one's soul due to the violence and may, therefore, decrease one's length in hell, one cannot avoid altogether the rebirth in hell that awaits one as a result of killing in war or terrorist actions. Textual passages within the Jaina literature express this ability to lessen the final debt without avoiding responsibility for demerit in a number of
ways:
Sinners cannot annihilate their works by new works; the pious annihilate their works by abstention. (Sūtrakrtānga I. xv.15)13
As a tortoise draws its limbs into its own body, so a wise man should cover, as it were, his sins with his own meditation. (Sūtrakrtanga I. viii.16)14
From the discussion above, it is apparent that the Jaina view of life stresses care and amity in the interaction with all living beings. Jainism, in principle, naturally espouses to nonviolence and, therefore, to some form of pacificism. Yet, as with all traditions, it has to wrestle with the difficulty of what to do with injustice and violence toward others as found in acts such as terrorism. Do we stick firmly to our non-violent principles and simply sit back and watch others suffer unjustly without lending a helping-hand to them?
The Jaina tradition, as is apparent from the following analysis by a contemporary Jaina teacher Muni Shri Nyayavijayaji, has chosen to tip the scales in favor of the need to
13. Hermann Jacobi (trans.), Jaina Sutras, op. cit., Part. II, p. 318.
14. Ibid., p.299.