World Problems And Jain Ethics

Author(s): Beni Prasad
Publisher: Beni Prasad

Page 11

is a social affair; that is to say, personality is a social product. It is embedded in social adjustments. All human experience goes to prove that exhortation and persuasion are not enough to call forth the moral life on the community-wide scale. The seed requires an appropriate soil and atmospheric conditions which constitute the environment. That is the truth underlying the proposition that a life of real non-violence is possible for mankind as a whole only within a social institutions and practices that are non-violence. The principle of non-voilence, then, really implies that life should be elevated altogether from the plane of force to that of reason, persuasion, accommodation, tolerance and mutual service.
set or
based
on
II
TRUTHFULNESS ( सत्य ).
It will be observed that the principle of nonviolence is closely allied to that of sincerity or truthfulness. It has been pointed out above that force from above evokes fraud from below. We have also seen that force is by itself frequently incapable of achieving the objective, that it entails too severe a strain and that it usually calls the assistance of fraud or deception. This is the truth underlying the dictum that all is fair in war. War indeed includes stratagems of all possible kinds. It has under modern conditions become totalitarian, dependent, that is to say, on a complete mobilization