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killing a human being is a capital crime deserving of capital punishment or death sentence, killing of pupa or ant should also be punishable with capital punishment. Drinking a tumbler full of water would mean killing innumerable water-bodied creatures, which would be equivalent to killing innumerable human beings and anybody who drank water should be hanged innumerable times. How ridiculous, impractical, unprincipled, inhuman, unjust and cruel this would be?
Another point in this connection that deserves our consideration is that as someone who kills a human being incurs sufficient sin to go to hell, so anyone who drinks water even once should go to hell. The truth of the matter is that the sin incurred in killing or depriving the vitalities of any living being is exponentially proportional to the stage of evolution that it is at. The greater the number of vitalities in a living being, the greater would be his power of sensitivity and greater would be the sin of killing it or depriving it of its vitalities. It is for this reason that the sin of killing a king or a political leader or a Brahmin, or a monk has been taken as greater than killing an ordinary person and the sin of killing an earthworm (a two sensed creature) has been considered as greater than that of killing all the water-bodied creatures in the ocean, because that earthworm is infinite times more meritorious and more sensitive than any one-sensed living being. Therefore the sin of killing the water-bodied creatures in a tumbler full of water is negligible as compared to the merit earned in giving a drink of water to a thirsty human or a thirsty animal. That is why in the ninth section of the Sthānānga sūtra giving a drink of water to a thirsty person has been mentioned as a meritorious act and not as a sin. It is the rule that more sensitive a living being, greater is the cruelty in, and greater is the sin of killing or tormenting it.
13. Objection - There is no relationship between the killing of a creature by another and violence. If it weren't so, then the fully detached omniscient Lords would also have incurred great sin as infinite living beings of the Nigoda class die in their practices of the destructive ladder just before they attain omniscience. However, the detached omniscient
Positive Non-Violence
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