Jainism and Ahimsa: Non-Violence Taken to Its Limit
Jainism is one of the world's oldest continuously practiced religions, built around ahimsa, non-violence carried further than most traditions carry it. This guide covers what Jains believe, who Mahavira and the twenty-four Tirthankaras were, the five vows, the Digambara and Svetambara split, why root vegetables are avoided, anekantavada, and the daily shape of Jain life.
What is Jainism, and what do Jains believe?
Jainism is an ancient Indian religion which holds that every living thing carries an eternal soul, or jiva, and that liberation comes from ceasing to harm those souls. It is non-theistic. Jains recognize no creator, and hold the universe to be uncreated, beginningless and running on its own laws. What they venerate instead are the Tirthankaras, human teachers who freed themselves and left a route for others. The tradition belongs to the sramana movement of ancient India, the renouncer culture that also produced Buddhism, and it stands apart from the Vedic mainstream in rejecting scriptural authority, animal sacrifice and priestly mediation. The core picture is simple to state and severe to live. The jiva is by nature omniscient and content, but it has been weighed down since beginningless time by karma, which Jains understand as an actual subtle matter that sticks to the soul and is drawn in whenever a person acts under the four passions Jains call kasaya: anger, pride, deceit and greed. Reduce the inflow, burn off the accumulation through austerity, and the soul rises free. Every rule in Jainism follows from that mechanics: the vows, the diet, the sweeping, the fasting. For how Jain rebirth compares with Hindu, Buddhist and other accounts, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
The word Jain comes from jina, conqueror, and the conquest meant is over one's own passions. Jains call their tradition the Jain dharma, or in older usage the teaching of the Jinas. The standard summary of the path is the three jewels, ratnatraya: right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, which Umasvati names together in the opening line of the Tattvartha Sutra as the road to liberation. That text, composed somewhere between the second and fifth centuries CE, is the one systematic work both major sects accept, which makes it the closest thing Jainism has to a shared catechism. Jain cosmology explains the tone of the religion. The universe is eternal and shaped, in the traditional image, like a standing human figure with the hells below the waist and the liberated souls at the crown. Time moves in vast descending and ascending half-cycles, and Jains hold that we live in a declining phase from which liberation is not currently available in this part of the world. On that reckoning nobody now living will become a Tirthankara. The work the tradition sets out is incremental, and it says so without embarrassment.
Is Jainism a philosophy or a religion?
Jainism is a religion, with temples, monastic orders, a festival calendar, pilgrimage sites and a body of scripture, though it carries an unusually large amount of formal philosophy inside it. Western writers have sometimes presented it as an ethical system because it has no creator god, which mistakes non-theism for secularity. Jains worship, fast, take vows and go on pilgrimage, and devotion is central to lay life.
What is a jiva in Jain thought?
A jiva is an individual living soul, and Jain thought counts far more of them than most traditions do. Humans, animals, insects, plants, and the elemental bodies of earth, water, fire and air each house jivas. Beings are graded by how many senses they possess, from one-sensed plants and elements up to five-sensed humans and animals, and harming a higher being is held to bind heavier karma.
What is the Navkar Mantra?
The Navkar Mantra, also called the Namokar Mantra, is the central Jain prayer, and it bows to five categories of spiritually advanced beings. Those five are the arihants, the liberated siddhas, the acharyas who lead orders, the upadhyayas who teach scripture, and all monks and nuns everywhere. No god is invoked and no Tirthankara is named, which Jains treat as the point.
What does ahimsa mean in Jainism, and how far do Jains take it?
Ahimsa in Jainism means the absence of any intention to harm a living being, extended to every soul in the universe and enforced across thought, speech and action alike. The English word non-violence undersells the demand. Ahimsa asks for a continuous audit of what a person does, eats, buys and intends. Jainism treats himsa, injury, as the mechanism by which karma binds to the soul, so avoiding it is the entire technique of liberation. The Acharanga Sutra, generally regarded as the oldest of the surviving Svetambara Agamas, puts the argument in a form that has barely changed since: all beings wish to live, none wish to suffer, and what you would not want done to you is what you should not do to anything else. The reach is what distinguishes the Jain version. Jain ethics counts nine ways of committing violence: doing it yourself, having another do it, or approving of it once done, each through mind, speech or body. Approval counts. Buying a product whose making killed something implicates the buyer. This is why Jains historically avoided farming, which turns soil full of creatures, and concentrated in trade, finance and gem-cutting. Buddhist compassion practice aims at a change of heart toward beings. Jain ahimsa aims at shutting off an inflow of karmic matter, and the two goals generate different rules.
Jain teaching accepts that no embodied life can be free of harm, and the tradition is candid about it. Breathing, walking and eating destroy something. What the vows target is samkalpi himsa, harm done deliberately, as against arambhi himsa, the unavoidable injury attached to living and working at all. A layperson is asked to shrink the second and eliminate the first; a monastic is asked to reduce both to whatever bare survival requires. The phrase most often quoted for this, ahimsa paramo dharma, non-violence is the highest duty, is older than Jainism's use of it and appears in the Mahabharata, but Jains read it more literally than the traditions around them did, extending it downward to beings most ethical systems never counted at all. Mohandas Gandhi grew up among Jains in Gujarat and named the Jain jeweler and poet Raychandbhai Mehta, known as Shrimad Rajchandra, as one of the three greatest influences on his life in his autobiography. Gandhi's political non-violence then took the doctrine into public confrontation, a place Jain monastics never intended it to go.
Does ahimsa forbid self-defense?
Jain teaching permits a layperson to defend themselves, their family and their household, and the lay vow of non-violence is deliberately drafted with that exception written in. What it forbids is the aggressive, intentional killing of a being that has not attacked. Jain kings and merchants historically maintained armies, and Jain writers on lay conduct argued for centuries about where the line sat. Monastics take the vow without exception and may not defend themselves at all.
Do Jains kill mosquitoes or pests?
Observant Jains avoid killing insects, and the everyday practice is removal rather than extermination: shaking a mosquito off, sweeping ants outdoors, screening windows, refusing pesticides at home. Many lay Jains do not claim perfect consistency, and will say so plainly about the compromises forced by modern housing, transport and medicine. Monastics hold the line much harder, which is why they filter their water and will not sit by a lamp that draws insects into a flame.
What is ahimsa in yoga, and is it the same thing?
Ahimsa is also the first of Patanjali's yamas in the Yoga Sutras, where it is a moral restraint that prepares a practitioner for meditation, so the two senses are related without being identical. The Jain version is broader and carries a physics with it: harm binds actual karmic matter to the soul, which raises the stake from preparatory to metaphysical. For ahimsa as a yogic precept alongside satya, see Throat Chakra (Vishuddha): Speaking Truth & Self-Expression.
Who was Mahavira, and what are the twenty-four Tirthankaras?
Mahavira was the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the present cosmic age, a renouncer from the warrior clans of what is now Bihar who reorganized an existing religion rather than founding a new one. Born Vardhamana, he left home at thirty, spent roughly twelve and a half years wandering in austerity, attained kevala jnana or omniscience, and taught for about thirty years before dying at Pavapuri. Svetambara tradition dates him 599 to 527 BCE. Digambara tradition gives 582 to 510 BCE. Historians who accept the revised Buddha chronology that Heinz Bechert pressed in the 1980s put his death nearer 425 BCE. He was an older contemporary of the Buddha, and early Buddhist texts refer to him as Nigantha Nataputta, a rival teacher already well established when the Buddha began. A Tirthankara is a ford-maker: one who has crossed the river of rebirth and left behind a crossing for others. Twenty-four appear in each descending half-cycle of time. They are not gods, not incarnations, and not available for petition, since a liberated soul has no further business with the world. Jains venerate their images and recall their qualities, and Jain theology is clear that whatever benefit follows belongs to the devotee, since a liberated soul sends nothing back.
Two Tirthankaras before Mahavira have some historical footing. Parshvanatha, the twenty-third, is treated by many historians of Indian religion as a plausibly historical figure rather than a purely legendary one. The 250-year gap before Mahavira that Jain sources give him is the tradition's own reckoning, however, and not an independently dated interval, so the two claims should not be run together. Jain texts describe Mahavira's own parents as followers of Parshva's order. Parshva's followers kept four restraints; Mahavira added celibacy as a separate fifth vow. The Svetambara canon itself reports that his rule dispensed with clothing where Parshva's had permitted it, in the Kesi and Gautama dialogue of the Uttaradhyayana Sutra, and the same passage preserves an account of the two lineages negotiating a merger. Rishabhanatha, also called Adinatha, is the first Tirthankara of this cycle, credited in Jain narrative with teaching agriculture, writing, law and the arts before renouncing all of them. Jain tradition holds that he attained liberation on Ashtapada, identified with Mount Kailash, and the mountain's wider significance across traditions is covered in Mount Kailash: History, Alignments and Spiritual Significance. The remaining Tirthankaras are known only through the tradition's own hagiography, with lifespans and statures that grow steadily less plausible the further back the list runs.
How do you recognize a Tirthankara image?
Each Tirthankara has a distinguishing emblem, a lanchana, carved below the figure, because the statues themselves are deliberately uniform and expressionless. Mahavira takes the lion, Parshvanatha a serpent hood raised over his head, Rishabhanatha the bull, Neminatha the conch. The figures appear either seated in the lotus posture or standing in kayotsarga, the motionless standing meditation. Digambara images are unclothed and plain, while Svetambara images are often given inset eyes and ornaments.
What is kevala jnana?
Kevala jnana is omniscience, the state in which a soul's innate knowledge stands fully uncovered because the karma obscuring it has been destroyed. Jains describe it as a recovery: the soul always knew everything, and karma acted as a screen over it. A being who attains it while still embodied is an arihant, teaching until the body drops away, and after death that soul becomes a siddha and rises to the top of the universe.
Why is Diwali significant to Jains?
Jains observe Diwali as the anniversary of Mahavira's nirvana at Pavapuri, and it opens the Jain new year in most reckonings. The festival is kept with lamps, fasting and recitation. Observant Jains avoid fireworks, because of the insects killed and the general destruction involved. Gautama Swami, Mahavira's chief disciple, is said in Jain accounts to have attained omniscience at dawn the following day.
What are the five vows, and how do lay Jains keep them differently from monks?
The five vows are ahimsa or non-violence, satya or truthfulness, asteya or not taking what is not given, brahmacharya or chastity, and aparigraha or non-possession, and the same five bind monastics absolutely and laypeople partially. Monks and nuns take them as mahavratas, great vows, without qualification and without exception. Laypeople take the identical five as anuvratas, small vows, scaled to a life that involves a household and a business. The scaling is codified in writing: the sravakacara literature, the Jain manuals of lay conduct, specifies which exceptions apply and where each line falls. In practice the lay version reads like this. Non-violence means no intentional killing, a vegetarian diet, and avoiding trades that destroy life, while permitting self-defense and the incidental harm of ordinary work. Truthfulness means no lie that causes harm, and silence in cases where speaking the truth would. Non-stealing extends past theft to tax evasion, adulteration and false weights. Chastity for the laity means fidelity within marriage. Non-possession means capping what you own, which the lay manuals formalize as parigraha-parimana, a vow fixing a personal ceiling on wealth, land and goods, with whatever exceeds the ceiling given away.
Beyond the five, the lay path adds seven supplementary vows and then a ladder of eleven stages called the pratimas, running from basic right belief up to a near-monastic renunciation that some elderly laypeople take. The pratimas were designed as a staircase, so a Jain who wants to go further always has a defined next step. Monastic life is correspondingly demanding. Monks and nuns own almost nothing, walk everywhere barefoot, refuse all vehicles, beg their food from lay households and accept only what the household was already cooking. They pull out their hair by hand rather than cut or shave it, in the rite called kesh-lochan, which the tradition counts as an austerity in its own right. The required frequency varies by order and by sect, and is usually at least annual. They pass the four months of the monsoon in one place, a practice called chaturmas, because the rains fill the ground with life that walking would crush. Ordination is meant for life, and returning to lay status still carries real stigma.
What is aparigraha and why does it matter?
Aparigraha is non-possession, and the target is attachment itself, not poverty as an achievement. A monastic owns a begging bowl, a whisk and, in the Svetambara case, robes. A layperson practices it by setting explicit limits on property, income and consumption, a discipline called parigraha-parimana. The reasoning runs through karma: attachment produces the passions, and the passions are what make karma stick to the soul.
How many Jain monks and nuns are there?
Jain monastic orders across all sects number in the thousands, a small population for a religion of several million, and nuns outnumber monks by a wide margin in the counts the orders themselves publish. How far back that ratio runs is harder to establish, since the orders kept no continuous census, and comparisons with other religions' monastic populations rest on figures gathered in very different ways. Svetambara orders account for most of the total. Digambara monks, whose rule is the strictest of any, have historically been the smallest group, counted in the hundreds.
Can a Jain layperson become a monk or nun later in life?
Yes, and Jain ordination carries no upper age limit, with many taking diksha after raising a family or retiring from business. Renunciation by teenagers and young adults also happens, and it periodically draws criticism in the Indian press over questions of consent and schooling. Candidates usually spend a probationary period traveling with an order first, and the initiation ceremony is public, elaborate and paid for by the family.
What separates Digambara Jains from Svetambara Jains?
Digambara and Svetambara are the two main Jain sects, and the original dispute between them was whether a monk may wear clothes. Digambara means sky-clad: their fully ordained monks go naked, on the argument that any possession at all, clothing included, is attachment, and that Mahavira himself went unclothed. Svetambara means white-clad, and their monks and nuns wear simple white robes, holding that Mahavira permitted clothing and that nudity is impractical and unnecessary. From that single point the rest follows, and the disagreements reach doctrine rather than dress. The sharpest is over women. Digambara doctrine holds that a woman cannot attain liberation in a female body, partly because she cannot practice complete nudity, and that such a soul must be reborn male to finish the work. Svetambaras reject this, and hold that the nineteenth Tirthankara, Malli, was a woman, whom Digambaras record instead as a man named Mallinatha. The two also differ over scripture. Svetambaras preserve a canon of Agamas redacted at Valabhi in the fifth century CE. Digambaras hold that the original teaching was lost, and rely instead on later systematic works, chiefly the Satkhandagama and the writings of Kundakunda.
The separation happened by drift, across centuries, with no single dramatic schism. Jain tradition traces it to a famine in Magadha under the Mauryas, when part of the community migrated south under Bhadrabahu and returned to find practice at home had loosened. Historians read that story as a retrospective explanation, and treat the division as hardening across the first several centuries CE, while Digambaras themselves date the formal break to the first century. Both sects contain subsects. Among Svetambaras, the Murtipujaka worship images in temples, while the Sthanakvasi, descended from a fifteenth-century reform led by Lonka Shah, reject image worship entirely and meet in plain halls. The Terapanth, founded in 1760 by Acharya Bhikshu, split from the Sthanakvasi and is unusual in placing the whole order under a single acharya. Geographically, Digambaras concentrate in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, Svetambaras in Gujarat and Rajasthan.
Do Digambara monks really go naked in public?
Yes. Fully ordained Digambara munis wear nothing at all, carry only a peacock-feather whisk and a water gourd, and travel on foot across India that way. The practice is long established in India and is generally tolerated where munis travel. It also keeps them inside India in practice, since a muni refuses vehicles of every kind and covers ground only on foot. Lower grades of Digambara renunciant, the ailak and the kshullak, wear a loincloth, and Digambara nuns, called aryikas, wear a single unstitched white sari.
What is a Digambara nun's status?
Digambara nuns, or aryikas, hold a formally lower rank than monks, because the doctrine holds that full ordination requires nudity and women do not practice it. An aryika wears one white sari and is technically classified with advanced laywomen, one rung below full ordination. Svetambara nuns, called sadhvis, take the same great vows as monks and form the largest single group of Jain renunciants.
Which sect is larger?
Svetambaras and Digambaras are of broadly comparable size, with Svetambaras usually reckoned the larger, though India's census does not record Jain sect and no reliable count exists. Wealth and institutional visibility concentrate in Svetambara Gujarat and Rajasthan and in the diaspora, which can make the Svetambara share look bigger than it is. Many Jains worship without paying much attention to the boundary at all.
Why do Jains avoid root vegetables, and what does a Jain diet include?
Jains avoid root vegetables because harvesting a root kills the entire plant, where picking a fruit or a leaf does not, and because Jain biology classifies roots and tubers as ananta-kaya, bodies housing an unlimited number of souls. Potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, radishes, beets, ginger and turmeric are all excluded in the strict version of the diet, which is why Jain cooking substitutes asafoetida for onion and garlic and takes its heat from pepper instead. Pulling a root also disturbs the soil, which Jain classification treats as crowded with one-sensed beings. The rest of the diet follows the same logic. Jains are lacto-vegetarian: no meat, fish or eggs, but milk and its products are accepted, on the historical assumption that milking kills nothing. Honey is excluded because harvesting it destroys bee larvae. Alcohol and most fermented food are avoided as sites of microbial life. Water is filtered, and the traditional rule is to strain it through cloth and return the residue to its source. Many observant Jains eat nothing after sunset, a practice called ratri-bhojana tyaga, because lamplight draws insects into food and because Jain texts hold that late food sits undigested.
Observance varies widely. The strictest form of the diet belongs to monastics, and to the devout during festival periods; it is not the daily rule for every Jain. Many Jains in India and the diaspora eat potatoes and onions without much internal conflict; others keep the full rule only during Paryushana or on particular lunar dates. The community is also arguing about dairy. Younger Jains in North America and Britain point out that industrial milk production kills male calves and sends spent cows to slaughter, which they say voids the assumption the old permission rested on, and a visible Jain vegan movement has grown out of that argument. More traditional voices resist, since ghee and milk are woven into ritual. Fasting is a discipline in its own right. The Jain calendar is dense with fast days, and multi-day fasts on water alone are undertaken by laypeople, women more often than men, during Paryushana.
What does Jain food mean on a restaurant menu?
Jain food on an Indian menu means the dish prepared without onion, garlic, potato or any other root, and usually without mushrooms, and Indian airlines and railways carry a designated Jain meal code. Restaurant chains in Mumbai and Gujarat mark Jain options routinely. The category is understood as vegetarian minus roots, and it does not by itself guarantee the stricter rules about fermentation, honey or eating hours.
Why do Jains avoid eating after sunset?
Eating after dark is avoided because artificial light and open flame attract insects that fall into the food, which turns the meal into an act of killing. The rule is older than electric light, and most observant Jains keep it regardless. A screened modern kitchen changes the original calculation, and Jains who defend the rule today tend to argue from the discipline of eating on a fixed schedule rather than from insect counts. Jain texts add a health argument, that food eaten late sits undigested overnight. Monastics keep the rule absolutely and take neither food nor water after sunset.
Do Jains eat mushrooms and fermented foods?
Mushrooms and other fungi are excluded because they grow on decay and are classified as housing many souls, and the same reasoning rules out most fermented foods, aged pickles, vinegar and alcohol. Yogurt is the standard exception, though the strict rule holds that curd must be eaten within a set window before microbial growth advances too far. Bread raised with yeast falls into a gray area that individual families settle for themselves.
What is anekantavada, and why do Jains refuse to claim one final answer?
Anekantavada is the Jain doctrine that reality has many aspects and that no single statement can capture all of them, so every claim holds true only from the standpoint in which it was made. The name means non-one-sidedness. Jains derive it from the same source as their ethics: a claim asserted absolutely is itself a form of violence, because it annihilates the partial truth held by everyone who sees the thing differently. Intellectual humility here is a vow rather than a temperament. The doctrine has two technical arms. Nayavada is the analysis of standpoints, the set of perspectives from which a thing can be described, such as its underlying substance, its current mode, or the name it goes by. Syadvada is conditioned assertion: every proposition takes the prefix syat, meaning in some respect, and Jain logicians built a sevenfold scheme of predication in which a thing can be said to be, not to be, both, inexpressible, and the combinations of those. The stock illustration is the blind men and the elephant, a parable Jain texts use to argue that each partial report is accurate about what it touched and wrong about the whole.
The obvious objection came early: if every statement is conditional, is anekantavada itself conditional? Shankara pressed a version of it in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, arguing that a doctrine which lets a thing both be and not be has said nothing at all. Jain logicians answered that the doctrine governs descriptions rather than standing among them, so it does not turn on itself. Working method mattered more than the debate did. Jain writers set out rival positions at length, in the opponent's own vocabulary, before answering them, which is why Haribhadra's eighth-century Shaddarshanasamuccaya, a compact survey of six Indian schools written from outside most of them, is still read as evidence of how those positions looked to a contemporary, the materialist Carvaka school among them, whose own texts did not survive. The habit shaped how Jains treated outsiders too. A religion committed to the partiality of its own statements had little appetite for conversion, and Jains argue among themselves about whether that produced real tolerance or a comfortable way of never having the argument.
Is anekantavada the same as relativism?
No. Anekantavada holds that reality is objectively many-sided and that our statements about it are partial, which limits what any statement can capture without denying that anything is true. A Jain philosopher would say the elephant genuinely exists and has a definite nature, and that the blind men are each right about a part of it. Jains also keep firm commitments, on karma, the soul and non-violence, that they do not treat as one option among many.
What is syadvada in plain terms?
Syadvada is the rule that every assertion should carry the qualifier syat, meaning from a certain point of view, or in some respect. Saying that a pot exists is incomplete. The pot exists as clay, in this place, now, in this shape, and does not exist as anything else. Jain logic formalized the possible qualifications into seven combinations, which later writers treated as an exhaustive list.
Does anekantavada mean all religions are equally true?
Not in the way that slogan is usually meant. Anekantavada says rival accounts often capture something real from their own standpoint, which makes Jains slow to condemn and quick to summarize an opponent fairly. It does not leave Jains indifferent between positions: Jain texts argue hard against Buddhist momentariness, Vedantic monism and the theistic schools, on the grounds that each of those views is one-sided.
What does Jain practice look like day to day, and what is sallekhana?
Daily Jain practice is built around six essentials, the avashyakas, which structure a devout Jain's morning and evening. The first, samayika, sets aside forty-eight minutes for seated equanimity, with all harmful activity renounced for the duration. Then come praise of the twenty-four Tirthankaras, chaturvimshati-stava, and vandana, which is reverence offered to one's teachers. Pratikramana follows: a formal review of the day's faults, recited from a fixed liturgy and run at far greater length on festival days. In kayotsarga, standing or seated, the practitioner lets go of identification with the body. Last, pratyakhyana takes a vow of renunciation for the day ahead, usually a restriction on food. Around that sit temple visits, image bathing and offering for Murtipujaka Jains, fasting on prescribed days, and giving to monastic and charitable causes. The year turns on Paryushana, eight days for Svetambaras, or Das Lakshana, ten days for Digambaras. Each closes with a day of forgiveness, called Samvatsari by Svetambaras and Kshamavani by Digambaras, when Jains ask pardon of everyone they have wronged with the phrase micchami dukkadam and are expected to mean it. Sallekhana sits at the far end of the same path: the vow to fast to death, taken only when death is already close through illness or age, and revocable at any point before it.
Sallekhana, also called santhara, is the Jain practice outsiders find hardest to accept, and the conditions written around it are strict. Death must already be near through terminal illness, extreme age or incapacity. The vow is closed to anyone seeking an escape from suffering, debt or disgrace. It requires the consent of a spiritual teacher, a settled and passionless state of mind, and a gradual withdrawal first from food and then from water. Jains distinguish it from suicide on the grounds that suicide is driven by passion while sallekhana is defined by the absence of it. Indian courts have taken the question up. In August 2015 the Rajasthan High Court ruled sallekhana illegal, equating it with attempted suicide. The Supreme Court of India stayed that judgment later the same month after nationwide Jain protest, and the practice continues while the legal question stays open. It is worth being plain about what sallekhana is not. It is undertaken inside a community that supervises it, with a teacher's authorization, by people whose death is already close for other reasons. It is not a technique anyone can lift out of that setting, and voluntary fasting of that length carries serious medical risk anywhere else; prolonged fasting of any kind is a matter to raise with a doctor first.
How many people undertake sallekhana?
Sallekhana deaths are rare in absolute terms but not exceptional within the community. Annual totals circulate in Indian press coverage and in community statements, usually in the low hundreds, but no registry collects them and the figure has never been audited to any independent standard, so it is best read as an order of magnitude rather than a count. Most who take the vow are elderly, and women outnumber men among them. The vow is announced publicly and the community gathers around the person, which makes a sallekhana death a communal event.
What is pratikramana?
Pratikramana is the Jain rite of reviewing and repenting the faults of a period, and the word means turning back. It is recited daily by the devout, in a longer form at fortnightly intervals, and at greatest length on Samvatsari at the close of Paryushana. The liturgy names specific categories of transgression against each vow, including harm done to one-sensed beings, and asks forgiveness for each one.
What does micchami dukkadam mean?
Micchami dukkadam is a Prakrit phrase meaning roughly may whatever wrong I have done be without effect, or may it be forgiven, and Jains exchange it at Samvatsari and at Kshamavani, the forgiveness day that closes Das Lakshana. It is directed at all beings, not only those a person has knowingly offended, and it is expected to be said to specific people, in person or by message, and a mass forward does not count. Refusing to forgive when asked is itself counted as a fault.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Jainism a branch of Hinduism?
No. Jainism is an independent religion with its own scriptures, monastic orders, cosmology and lineage of teachers, and it predates the word Hinduism by a very long way. It rejects the authority of the Vedas, denies a creator god, and refuses animal sacrifice and priestly mediation, all of which placed it outside the Vedic mainstream from the beginning. The confusion arises because Jains share vocabulary, art, festivals and social structures with their Hindu neighbors, and because Indian law has at times folded Jains into a broad Hindu category for personal law, which Jain organizations have contested. India granted Jains national minority status in 2014.
Do Jains believe in God?
Jains do not believe in a creator god. The universe in Jain teaching is eternal and uncreated, running on its own laws without a designer, and Jain philosophers wrote detailed arguments against the existence of any such being. Jains do accept gods, called devas, but these are beings inside the cycle of rebirth, more fortunate than humans and no more liberated. What Jains venerate are the Tirthankaras and other liberated souls, who are perfect and entirely inactive: they cannot grant favors, answer prayers or intervene. Devotion in Jainism works on the devotee, and its object neither notices nor responds.
How many Jains are there, and where do they live?
India's 2011 census counted about 4.45 million Jains, roughly 0.4 percent of the country's population, and global estimates including the diaspora usually fall between four and six million, depending on how the diaspora is counted. Within India they concentrate in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Outside India, sizeable communities live in the United States, Britain, Canada, Kenya and Belgium, the last built around the Antwerp diamond trade. Jains recorded the highest literacy rate of any religious community in that census, and the community's economic weight is far larger than its share of the population would suggest.
Why do some Jains wear a cloth over their mouth?
The mouth cloth, called a muhpatti, prevents the wearer from inhaling or harming tiny airborne organisms and blunts the force of speech, which Jain teaching holds can injure air-bodied beings. Sthanakvasi and Terapanth monks and nuns wear it permanently, tied across the face, and that is the version outsiders usually photograph. Svetambara Murtipujaka monastics carry one and hold it in front of the mouth while speaking, reciting or eating, and set it down otherwise. Digambara monks use none at all. Laypeople sometimes hold a cloth during rituals for the same reason.
Why do Jain monks sweep the path in front of them?
Jain monastics carry a small soft broom and sweep the ground before sitting down or setting anything on it, so that insects and other small creatures are swept clear before any weight comes down. Svetambara renunciants use a rajoharana, a bundle of woolen threads on a wooden handle. Digambara monks use a picchi made from peacock feathers the birds have shed naturally, chosen because they are soft enough to move an insect without injuring it. The whisk is also among the very few objects a monastic may own, and it is handed over at ordination.
Can someone born outside the community become a Jain?
Yes in doctrine, with real friction in practice. Jain teaching sets no ethnic or hereditary condition on the path, and Jain philosophy holds that any soul can progress. But Jainism has no conversion rite comparable to baptism, has not sought converts for most of its history, and works socially as a set of endogamous communities in India where being Jain is inherited along with family, caste and business networks. Diaspora temples in North America and Britain are generally more open, and non-Jains attend, take vows and practice. Acceptance tends to arrive through relationships built over years.
Is Jainism older than Buddhism?
Yes, on the evidence available. Mahavira was an older contemporary of the Buddha and led an order that already existed before him, and early Buddhist scriptures describe the Jains, whom they call Niganthas, as an established rival group with a settled doctrine of its own. Parshvanatha, the twenty-third Tirthankara, is widely treated as a plausibly historical predecessor rather than a legend, which would push the continuous history back further still. The two-and-a-half-century gap Jain texts place between him and Mahavira comes from the tradition's own chronology and has no independent confirmation, so it fixes an order rather than a date. Jain claims of far greater antiquity, running back through twenty-four Tirthankaras across cosmic ages, are claims of theology, and historians do not read them as chronology.
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Related topics: jainism, jain beliefs, ahimsa jainism, jain religion explained, jainism practices, digambara svetambara, jain philosophy
