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पुरुषार्थसिद्धयुपाय joyful to all, and we should remember that the disregard of their appeals for mercy, and the sight of the pain and writhings of their bleeding and dying carcasses must recoil on our own souls, furnishing us with brutal and butcher-like tendencies, thus engendering karmas which cannot be easily destroyed, and which form an ever-hardening shell round the soul.
Jain, C.R., The Key of Knowledge, p. 579-580.
Don't harden your soul's natural instincts
If we would but ponder a little over the matter, we should find that the slaughter of animals is not only sinful, but quite unnecessary as well. Taste, of which we make so much in insisting upon an animal diet, is not at all in the things which we take in or absorb. The aesthetic pleasure which simple, wholesome, non-animal food affords to the soul on account of its natural purity, cannot be equaled by the most sumptuous and expensive preparations from dead entrails and carcasses of birds and beasts, however much we might endeavour to conceal their sickening stench by condiments and spices. Besides, taste for flesh is only an acquired something like all other tastes. When a man takes to smoking his instincts revolt from the fumes of nicotine, but with each repetition, they become more and more blunted, till they lose their natural delicacy altogether, and actually long for that which they had abhorred before. The same is the case with all other evil things; they not only vitiate the natural instincts of the soul, but also tend to harden one's heart.
Jain, C.R., The Key of Knowledge, p. 581.
Renounce himsā in all its forms
... no one who is not prepared to renounce himsā (injuring others), in all its three forms can ever hope for salvation or
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