World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 493

Arhat Vardhamāna's Attitude Toward 'Ahimsā'
- M.A. Dhaky
Arhat Vardhamāna, who soon after, and later much more frequently, was to be addressed by his epithetical nomen ‘Jina Mahāvīra', is well-known in Jainism as well as in the history of Indian religions for his resolute insistence on ahimsā, non-violence. Since his days, ahimsā has remained the pivotal doctrine around which Jainism had revolved. For Mahāvīra, it was an invarial ethical and moral principle of conduct that led to one's spiritual well-being, advancement, and uplifting. It is the very first of the five great and inalienable vows a Nirgrantha friar/nun took, and still takes, at the time of initiation in the ecclesiastical order and has to follow it as an unswerving practice for the rest of his/her life.
Vardhamāna's personal attitude toward ahiṁsā can best be culled out from his own utterances which undoubtedly, just as unambiguously, are preserved in their original form and content only inside a single work, the first book of the Acāranga-sūtra ("Skandha" I, c. B.C. 507-477 and, in part B.C. 200 as well as c. 1st cent. B.C.-A.D.)' which, by the consensus of the non- Digambara Jaina scholars as well as non-Jaina Jainologists including Western is the earliest Nirgranthian canonical work. In the relatively more ancient agamas next in time, such as the Daśavaikälika (c. B.C. 400-375, the date applicable only to the first two which are the earliest surviving chapters, and later in c. B.C. 200 for the remaining eight chapters and appendices)3 and the Acaranga's second book (“Skandha" II, c. 1st cent. B.C.-A.D.), what is stipulated within the corpus of the monastic rules for the permissible food for the Nirgratha recluses, as also what is attributed to Mahāvīra in the Vyākhyāprajñpti (c. 1st- 3rd cent. A.D.), has to be closely as well as carefully looked into and critically examined vis-à-vis what Mahāvīra himself had said and firmly believed. This main issue apart, one must keep in mind a significant and vital fact that the dogmatical and the scholastic part of the extant canon, derives from and represents a further development of the preachings of Arhat Pārsva. These presumably were embodied in an undeveloped and succinct form in what in the tradition were called the Pūrva or 'former/ anterior texts, anterior in the sense they preceded the canonical works composed within the fold of the sect of Arhat Vārdhamāna. These are for long lost. The huge mass of the dogmatic/scholastic literature available in Vardhmāna's sect, in point of fact, could not have originated from Arhat Vardhamāna, judging from his own utterances which in part exhibit the colour and flavour of the teachings of the early upanisads minus Brahman".
Arhat Vardhamāna's own utterances are strongly individualistic an at once recognizable. They are couched in a very archaic mould and phrasing, yet lucid and forceful. These are cast either in the form of concise
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