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CHAPTER SEVEN
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form of its effect. Hence the net meaning of the aphorism is that whatever prāņavadha is due to pramattayoga that is himsā or violence.
Question : To deprive a living being of its life or to inflict injury on it—that is violence. This meaning of violence is comprehensible to every one and is also much well known. Why then is the element yielded by the phrase pramattayoga superadded to this meaning ?
Answer : So long as thought and action characterized by high refinement do not gain entry within the human society there is no particular difference between such a society and the other species of living beings so far as their practice is concerned. Just like animals and birds, a man belonging to such a society impelled by a prepossession deprives a living being of its lifeknowingly or unknowingly, feeling a need or feeling no need whatsoever. When in this primitive stage of human society—so replete with violence—the thought of some individual is roused to reflect over the nature of violence, then he pronounces as a defilement the violence that is current—that is, violence of the form of depriving a living being of its life—and preaches that no living being should be deprived of its life. Thus on the one side there is a well-established tendency born of a custom like violence and on the other side the rise of the new attitude of nonviolence, and when there ensues a conflict between the two certain questions-raised from the side of the tendency to violence-automatically pose themselves before the opponent of violence; and these questions are also posed before him by others. In brief the questions are three :
(1) Even the advocates of non-violence have to maintain life after all, and it is impossible for one to maintain life without resorting to violence in one form or another. So the violence resorted to in connection with maintaining life—is that or is that not covered under the defilement designated violence ?
(2) So long as it is not proved that it is possible for mistake and ignorance to be utterly absent from man's actions it
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