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• My third question addresses actual practice on the workfloor: In an ideal world we would be able to take time to consider all our decisions and resulting behavior carefully. In actual life things are far more hurried, blurred, and ambiguous. Having grown up in a Jain family and community in India and later in Europe, and now having business relations all over the world, how do you actually make accountable decisions? How do lofty values such as ahimsā and ultimate concerns such as mokṣa survive the daily business battle, the multiple stakeholders, the often opposing interests, the greed and vanity and showmanship of international/multinational business life? What actually guides you in your so-called niscaya (determination, clarity, spiritual certitude) when dealing with multiple stakeholders and various (often conflicting) interests at stake? How are compromises reached and justified? Are spiritual
accountability, social accountability and corporate accountability the same, and if not, what criteria are used in initiatives, negotiations, decision making? How much room is there for a clean conscience, for a serving type of leadership, and for fair trade in terms of karma and āśrava's (the subtle influx of karmic particles through any thought, wish, action, imagination, feeling etc.) at all? How could one ever do it right on all accounts?
Interview
The first steps then in the actual interview were attempts to coordinate T's intentions with those picked up by R, or as R said:
“Yes, I fully understand it is not an exam, but, in a nutshell, a question about how two worlds may or may not go together. On the one hand, there is Jainism, its principles, a religion with all that is mentioned in it, what is good, what is bad, what is faithful, what is not faithful, all the points. And, on the other hand, you have normal life, the day to day life, family in the world, the worldly life, and in which, from a certain viewpoint, you are considered a successful businessman. So how do you bring one and one together, are you living two separate lives, like if you had two characters, like a schizophrenic, sometimes moving from this life into that life, depending on your state of mind, or do you bring parts of one life into the other? How are you living this, what is the feeling, is it difficult or easy to live this way. What is happening?"
“Yes, we are on speaking terms”, T responded, and “what I would like to begin with is to note that, indeed, you have quite an emphasis on these ideals in your expression of graphics, not only on your website, but also clearly in your department here, because when I entered, I could see the symbols of sustainability, ethics, etc. on some of the company charts on the wall. In other words, it is really a value for you. But what I noticed is that, on your company's website, there is nothing about Jainism at all. Yet in the first and most extensive part of your thesis, you decided to write about Jainism from a deeply religious point of view. So that is why we should talk about it. Because on the one hand there is the display of ethical values in the company, the ideals to be put into practice, and on the other hand there is this intense scholastic engagement with the Jain scriptures with their extremely high ideals”.
360
