Jainismजैन धर्म

Jainism (Sanskrit Jaina, “follower of the Jinas”) is one of the oldest living religions of India, and one of its great philosophical traditions. Its teachers are the Jinas, “conquerors” — those who have conquered their passions and attained omniscience — also called tīrthaṅkaras, “ford-makers”, because they make a ford across the river of rebirth. Jains count twenty-four tīrthaṅkaras in the present cosmic age; the last, Mahāvīra (Vardhamāna, traditionally 599–527 BCE, but probably c. 497–425 BCE), was an older contemporary of the Gautama Buddha in the same region of the eastern Gaṅgā plain. Like Buddhism, Jainism rejected the authority of the Vedas, the Brahmin priesthood and the animal sacrifice; unlike Buddhism, it affirmed an eternal, individual soul (jīva), and it developed an ethic of non-violence (ahiṃsā) more radical than any other in human history. Its philosophers produced a realist metaphysics of souls and matter, a theory of karma as a physical substance, and a sophisticated logic of many-sidedness (anekāntavāda) and conditional predication (syādvāda) that has fascinated modern logicians. Though Jains have always been a small minority, their influence on Indian ethics, art, literature, commerce and politics — above all through Gandhi — has been immense.

History

The tīrthaṅkaras

Jain tradition holds that Jainism is eternal, revealed anew in each cosmic cycle by twenty-four tīrthaṅkaras. The first of the present age, Ṛṣabha (Ādinātha), is said to have lived an immense span of time ago and to have taught humanity agriculture, writing and the arts. Of the twenty-four, only the last two are generally regarded as historical. Pārśvanātha, the twenty-third, probably lived in the eighth or ninth century BCE in Vārāṇasī and taught four restraints: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing and non-possession. Mahāvīra, the twenty-fourth, added a fifth — celibacy — and reorganised the community. See Mahāvīra.

The early community

After Mahāvīra’s death (nirvāṇa), his teachings were preserved orally by his disciples, the gaṇadharas. Jainism spread through the Gaṅgā plain under the Nanda and Maurya kings; Jain tradition claims that Candragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan empire, abdicated, became a Jain monk under the teacher Bhadrabāhu, migrated south during a twelve-year famine, and died by ritual fasting at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka. Whether or not this is true, Jainism did take root in the south, in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, as well as in the west, in Gujarat and Rajasthan, where its strength still lies.

The great schism

The community split into two main sects, traditionally dated to the first centuries CE, over monastic practice and scripture:

• Digambara (“sky-clad”): fully committed monks go naked, as Mahāvīra did, renouncing even clothing; women cannot attain liberation in a female body; the original scriptures were lost, and authority lies in later texts by teachers like Kundakunda.
• Śvetāmbara (“white-clad”): monks and nuns wear white robes; women can attain liberation (the nineteenth tīrthaṅkara, Mallī, was a woman); a canon of scriptures (Āgamas) was compiled at the councils of Pāṭaliputra (c. 300 BCE?) and Valabhī (453 or 466 CE).

Both sects have sub-traditions; among Śvetāmbaras, the Sthānakavāsī and Terāpanthī reject temple image-worship.

Classical and medieval Jainism

Jain philosophers were full participants in the classical Indian debate. Umāsvāti (c. 2nd–5th century) wrote the Tattvārtha Sūtra, the first Sanskrit summary of Jain doctrine, accepted by both sects. Kundakunda (Digambara, c. 2nd–8th century) wrote mystical treatises distinguishing the absolute and conventional points of view. Siddhasena Divākara (5th century) and Samantabhadra (6th century?) founded Jain logic; Akalaṅka (8th century) and Vidyānanda developed it; Haribhadra (8th century) wrote a celebrated, remarkably fair survey of all Indian philosophies, the Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya. Hemacandra (1088–1172), adviser to the Caulukya kings of Gujarat, was a polymath who wrote on grammar, poetics, logic, lexicography, history and yoga. Jain monks were among India’s greatest scholars, writing in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Apabhraṃśa, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati and Hindi, and preserving manuscripts — including Hindu and Buddhist texts — in their great libraries (bhaṇḍāras) at Patan and Jaisalmer.

In the medieval and modern periods, Jain communities, often merchants and bankers, became wealthy and built temples of extraordinary beauty: the marble temples of Dilwara at Mount Abu (11th–13th century), the 1,444-pillared temple at Ranakpur (15th century), and the hill of nearly 900 temples at Palitana.

Metaphysics

Souls and non-souls

Jain metaphysics is a realist dualism. Reality consists of souls (jīva) and non-souls (ajīva), both eternal and uncreated.

Souls are infinite in number. Each soul is by nature pure consciousness, with infinite knowledge, perception, energy and bliss; but in the state of bondage these are obscured by karma. Souls are not all-pervading (as in Nyāya) nor atomic (as in Rāmānuja); they expand and contract to fill the body they occupy, like the light of a lamp filling a large or small room.

Souls exist everywhere. Jains classify living beings by the number of their senses: one-sensed beings with touch only — earth-bodies, water-bodies, fire-bodies, air-bodies and plants; two-sensed (touch and taste) — worms, leeches; three-sensed (adding smell) — ants, lice; four-sensed (adding sight) — flies, bees; five-sensed — animals, humans, gods and hell-beings, some with mind. The world is, quite literally, full of souls; the earth under one’s feet, the water one drinks, the air one breathes, contain living beings. This vision underlies Jain ethics.

Non-souls are of five kinds: matter (pudgala), made of atoms, with touch, taste, smell and colour; dharma, the medium of motion; adharma, the medium of rest; space (ākāśa); and time (kāla, recognised by some schools). Together with souls these are the six substances (dravyas).

Karma as matter

The most distinctive Jain doctrine is that Karma is material. The universe is filled with extremely fine particles of karmic matter. When a soul acts with passion (kaṣāya) — anger, pride, deceit, greed — its vibrations attract these particles, which flow in (āsrava) and bind (bandha) to it “like dust sticking to a body smeared with oil”. The more intense the passion, the more and the longer the karma binds. Karma is classified into eight types: four “destructive” (ghātiyā) types that obscure the soul’s knowledge, perception, bliss and energy, and four “non-destructive” (aghātiyā) types that determine one’s body, lifespan, status and experiences of pleasure and pain.

Karmic matter also colours the soul; Jains speak of six leśyās, “colourings” — black, blue, grey, red, yellow and white — corresponding to degrees of moral purity.

The seven truths

The Jain path is often summarised in seven (or nine) tattvas, “truths”: soul (jīva), non-soul (ajīva), inflow of karma (āsrava), bondage (bandha), stopping the inflow (saṃvara), shedding karma (nirjarā) and liberation (mokṣa); some add merit (puṇya) and demerit (pāpa). Liberation requires both stopping new karma — by vigilance, restraint and the vows — and burning off old karma — by austerity (tapas), especially fasting, and by meditation.

The universe

The universe (loka) is uncreated and eternal. Jain cosmology pictures it as a vast figure of a standing man with arms akimbo: the hells below, the middle world (where humans live, on the continent of Jambūdvīpa) at the waist, the heavens above, and at the very top, the siddha-loka, the abode of liberated souls. Time moves in endless cycles, each with an ascending and a descending half, of six ages each; we live in the fifth age of the descending half, an age of decline in which liberation is no longer possible from this world.

No creator God

Jainism is non-theistic. The universe was never created and needs no creator; karma operates by its own nature, without a divine judge. Jain philosophers produced some of the most incisive arguments against a creator God in Indian philosophy. Jinasena (9th century) asks: “If God created the world, where was he before creation? If he was not in space, where did he put the world? How could a formless, immaterial God create matter? If he needed materials, where did they come from — and if they were already there, why not say they are uncreated too?” The Jains worship the tīrthaṅkaras, not as creators or saviours, but as perfect models; they cannot answer prayers, being liberated and beyond the world.

Ethics

Ahiṃsā

The heart of Jainism is ahiṃsā, non-violence — “the supreme dharma” (ahiṃsā paramo dharmaḥ). It means not harming any living being, in thought, word or deed, whether by doing, causing others to do, or approving of harm. Since all beings have souls, and since every harm binds karma, the Jain ideal is to minimise harm to the least possible degree.

This ethic shapes Jain life in extraordinary detail. Jains are strict vegetarians; most also avoid root vegetables (potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots), because uprooting a plant kills it and the many tiny beings in the soil, and honey, because gathering it harms bees. Many do not eat after sunset, lest insects be harmed in the dark. Monks and nuns carry a soft broom (rajoharaṇa) to sweep insects from their path; Śvetāmbara monks may wear a cloth over the mouth; Digambara monks drink only boiled water. Jain businessmen historically avoided occupations involving violence — farming, which kills creatures in the soil, and trades in weapons, leather or alcohol — which partly explains their concentration in commerce and banking. Jains established hospitals for animals and birds (pinjrapoles), which still exist.

The vows

Jain ethics is organised in five great vows (mahāvratas) for monks and nuns, and five lesser vows (aṇuvratas) for laypeople, which are the same vows held less strictly:

1. Ahiṃsā — non-violence;
2. Satya — truthfulness;
3. Asteya — not taking what is not given;
4. Brahmacarya — celibacy (for laypeople, sexual fidelity);
5. Aparigraha — non-possession, non-attachment.

The same five appear in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras as the yamas — an example of a shared ethical culture. Laypeople take additional vows limiting their travel, consumption and possessions, and practise regular fasts, confession (pratikramaṇa) and meditation.

The ideal death is sallekhanā (also santhārā): when death is inevitable through old age or terminal illness, a Jain may take a vow to gradually reduce food and water, dying peacefully in meditation, free of attachment to the body. Jains distinguish it sharply from suicide, which is an act of passion.

The three jewels

The path to liberation is summed up in the three jewels (ratnatraya), named in the first sūtra of the Tattvārtha Sūtra: right faith (samyag-darśana) in the Jain truths, right knowledge (samyag-jñāna) of them, and right conduct (samyak-cāritra) in accordance with them. “Right faith, right knowledge and right conduct together constitute the path to liberation.”

Epistemology and logic

Kinds of knowledge

Jain philosophers recognise five kinds of knowledge: sensory knowledge (mati), scriptural or verbal knowledge (śruta), clairvoyance (avadhi), telepathy (manaḥparyāya), and omniscience (kevala-jñāna), the knowledge of everything, past, present and future, attained by the soul freed from obscuring karma. The tīrthaṅkaras are omniscient, and Jain scripture derives its authority from their omniscience. The Mīmāṃsakas and others denied that any human could be omniscient; the Jain-Mīmāṃsā debate on omniscience was a long one.

Anekāntavāda: many-sidedness

The most celebrated Jain contribution to philosophy is Anekāntavāda, the doctrine of “non-one-sidedness” or many-sidedness: reality is complex, with infinite aspects, and no single statement or viewpoint can capture it entirely. A thing is permanent with respect to its substance and impermanent with respect to its modes; a pot of gold is the same gold when melted into a crown, but the pot is gone. Rival philosophies are not simply wrong; each grasps one aspect of the truth and errs by absolutising it. The Buddhists, who say everything is momentary, see change; the Vedāntins, who say reality is unchanging, see permanence; the Jains see both.

The doctrine is illustrated by the famous parable of the blind men and the elephant, told in Jain (and also Buddhist and Hindu) sources: blind men touching different parts of an elephant declare it is like a snake (the trunk), a pillar (the leg), a fan (the ear), a wall (the side), a rope (the tail) — each right about his part, each wrong about the whole.

Nayavāda: standpoints

The theory of nayas, “standpoints”, analyses the partial viewpoints from which statements are made — for example, the substantial standpoint (dravyārthika), which sees what endures, and the modal standpoint (paryāyārthika), which sees what changes. Jain philosophers distinguished seven standpoints, from the “common-sense” to the strictly etymological.

Syādvāda: the logic of “maybe”

Syādvāda, the doctrine of syāt (“in some respect”, “from a certain point of view”, often mistranslated “maybe”), holds that every statement should be qualified to indicate that it is true only conditionally. It is formalised in the saptabhaṅgī, the “sevenfold predication”. Of any object and any property, one may say:

1. In some respect, it is (syād asti).
2. In some respect, it is not (syān nāsti).
3. In some respect, it is and is not (syād asti nāsti).
4. In some respect, it is inexpressible (syād avaktavyam) — when both are asserted simultaneously.
5. In some respect, it is and is inexpressible.
6. In some respect, it is not and is inexpressible.
7. In some respect, it is, is not, and is inexpressible.

A pot, for example, exists as a pot, in its own place, time and form; it does not exist as a cloth, or in another place; it both exists and does not in these two respects successively; and it is inexpressible if one tries to say both at once. Critics — Vedāntins like Śaṅkara, Buddhists like Dharmakīrti — attacked the doctrine as contradictory and indecisive. Modern logicians have compared it to many-valued, paraconsistent and modal logics, and to context-dependent truth.

Relations with other traditions

Jainism and Buddhism are sibling śramaṇa traditions, born in the same place and time, sharing much vocabulary — karma, nirvāṇa, the rejection of the Veda and of caste privilege — and arguing constantly. Their main philosophical difference is the self: Jains affirm an eternal soul, Buddhists deny one. Jain and Buddhist texts mock each other; the Buddhist canon portrays Mahāvīra (“Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta”) and his followers as fanatical ascetics, and Jain texts portray the Buddha as a lax hedonist.

With Hinduism, Jainism has had a long, complex relationship of rivalry, mutual influence and social intimacy. Jains rejected the Veda and caste privilege, but over time Jain communities adopted caste-like social structures; Hindu vegetarianism and ahiṃsā owe much to Jain influence; and Jain and Hindu merchants have often intermarried, especially in Gujarat.

Jainism and Gandhi

The most famous modern influence of Jainism was on Mahatma Gandhi. He grew up in Gujarat, where Jain culture was pervasive; his mother was devoted to fasting and vows; and his most important spiritual mentor in his youth was the Jain poet-philosopher Shrimad Rajchandra (Raychandbhai, 1867–1901), with whom he corresponded from South Africa. Gandhi’s ethic of non-violence, his fasts, his vows of truth, celibacy and non-possession, and his conviction that truth is many-sided — “I am an advaitist and yet I can support dvaitism” — all bear the Jain stamp. Through Gandhi, and then Martin Luther King Jr., the Jain idea of ahiṃsā helped reshape the politics of the twentieth century.

Jainism in conversation

The elephant and the blind men is the Jain contribution to every argument: each side may be touching something real, and no one is touching the whole. And ahiṃsā paramo dharmaḥ — non-violence is the highest duty — taken to its logical end, means sweeping the path before you lest you step on an ant.