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104 : Śramana, Vol 59, No. 3/July-September 2008
those emotions of sympathy and "conscience." I mean those emotions of sympathy and compassion, which make us place ourselves in the situation of a suffering creature and suffer, as it were, with it, especially when we have reason to feel ourselves responsible for its sufferings : as in the case of a night-flutterer rushing into the light we allowed to burn unscreened, in our carelessness, or in the case of a bird which was starved in its cage through our forgetfulness, or in the case of a helpless deer which we killed with our own hand, in fit of huntsman's zeal, and the sight of whose mutilated body makes us after all, sick and miserable. It is that universal postulate, which Hemacandra, the great Acarya and teacher of King Kumarapal of Gujarat, has expressed in that often quoted stanze (Yogaśāstra II, 20):
ätmavatsarvabhütcṣu sukhaduḥkhe priyapriyel cintayannātmanoniṣṭāṁ hiṁsämanyasya näcaret||
"In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self, and should therefore, refrain from inflicting upon others such injury as would appear undesirable to us if inflicted upon ourselves."
Akin to dispositions of this kind is a certain sense of chivalrousness, a certain generosity, which overcomes us whenever we see a small innocent creature being at our mercy, provided our mind is calm enough to visualize its utter helplessness: that feeling which unfailingly overcomes even the case-hardened hunter on the occasion of battue-shooting, and which makes him, perhaps for an instant only, regret to have joined such an ungentle manlike sport as this wholesale slaughter of helpless creatures surely is.
Another feeling of this kind is a certain instinct of economy, which, with sensible persons, proves a powerful pleader in favour of Ahimsa : I mean that spontaneous conviction that it is not right to kill, or to cause to be killed, such a high organized creature as a
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