Jainism and Ahimsa: Non-Violence Taken to Its Limit

What is Jainism, and what do Jains believe?

Imagine you invite a new coworker to lunch. She politely asks whether the curry has onion or garlic, skips the potatoes, and mentions she won't eat after sunset. Who lives this carefully, and why?

The short answer: She may well be Jain. Jainism is an ancient Indian religion holding that every living thing carries an eternal soul, a jiva, and that liberation comes from ceasing to harm those souls. It has no creator: the universe is uncreated, beginningless and self-governing. Jains venerate the Tirthankaras, human teachers who freed themselves and left a route for others.

It belongs to the sramana movement, the renouncer culture that also produced Buddhism, and rejects Vedic scriptural authority, animal sacrifice and priestly mediation. The jiva is naturally omniscient and content, but since beginningless time it has been weighed down by karma, a real, subtle matter that sticks to the soul whenever you act from the four passions, kasaya: anger, pride, deceit and greed. Picture dust settling on a mirror. Reduce the inflow, burn off the buildup through austerity, and the soul rises free. Every rule, from diet to sweeping to fasting, follows from this. For other rebirth teachings, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.

Jain comes from jina, conqueror, meaning one who conquers their own passions. Jains call their tradition the Jain dharma, or in older usage the teaching of the Jinas. The path is summed up as 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. Composed between the second and fifth centuries CE, it is the one systematic work both sects accept.

The universe is eternal and shaped, traditionally, like a standing human figure, hells below the waist and liberated souls at the crown. Time moves in vast descending and ascending half-cycles, and Jains hold that we live in a declining phase in which liberation is not currently available in this part of the world, so nobody now living will become a Tirthankara. The work is incremental, and the tradition says so plainly.

What does ahimsa mean in Jainism, and how far do Jains take it?

Think of the harm you cause unintentionally on an ordinary day: the ant underfoot, the cheap shirt, the sharp word. Ahimsa asks you to notice it all.

In Jainism, ahimsa is the absence of any intention to harm any living soul, in thought, speech and action: a continuous audit of what you do, eat, buy and intend. Since himsa, injury, is how karma binds to the soul, avoiding it is the whole technique of liberation.

The Acharanga Sutra, generally regarded as the oldest surviving Svetambara Agama, puts it simply: all beings wish to live, none wish to suffer, so do not do to anything what you would not want done to you.

Jain ethics counts nine ways of committing violence: doing it, having it done, or approving it, each by mind, speech or body. Approval counts, so buying a product whose making killed something implicates you. That is why Jains historically avoided farming, which turns soil full of creatures, and went into trade, finance and gem-cutting. Buddhist compassion aims at a change of heart; Jain ahimsa at shutting off karmic inflow, which yields different rules.

Jain teaching admits no embodied life is harmless: breathing, walking and eating destroy something. The vows target samkalpi himsa, deliberate harm, as against arambhi himsa, the unavoidable injury of living and working. A layperson is asked to shrink the second and eliminate the first; a monastic, to cut both to what bare survival requires.

The famous phrase ahimsa paramo dharma, non-violence is the highest duty, predates Jain use and appears in the Mahabharata, but Jains read it more literally, extending it to beings most ethical systems never counted.

Mohandas Gandhi grew up among Jains in Gujarat and, in his autobiography, named the Jain jeweler and poet Raychandbhai Mehta, known as Shrimad Rajchandra, as one of the three greatest influences on his life. Gandhi took the doctrine into political confrontation, where Jain monastics never meant it to go.

Who was Mahavira, and what are the twenty-four Tirthankaras?

If you have ever wanted a teacher who lived what he taught, Jains point to Mahavira.

Mahavira was the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of this cosmic age, a renouncer from the warrior clans of what is now Bihar who reorganized an existing religion rather than founding one. Born Vardhamana, he left home at thirty, wandered in austerity for roughly twelve and a half years, attained kevala jnana, omniscience, and taught about thirty years before dying at Pavapuri.

Svetambaras date him 599 to 527 BCE, Digambaras 582 to 510 BCE; historians following the revised Buddha chronology Heinz Bechert pressed in the 1980s put his death nearer 425 BCE. Early Buddhist texts call him Nigantha Nataputta, an established rival of the younger Buddha.

A Tirthankara is a ford-maker, one who crossed the river of rebirth and marked the safe stones for others. Twenty-four appear in each descending half-cycle. They are not gods or incarnations and cannot be petitioned, since a liberated soul has no further business with the world. Jains venerate their images and recall their qualities, and any benefit belongs to the devotee.

Many historians treat Parshvanatha, the twenty-third Tirthankara, as plausibly historical. The 250-year gap Jain sources place before Mahavira is the tradition's own reckoning, not independently dated, so keep the two claims apart.

Jain texts make Mahavira's parents followers of Parshva's order, which kept four restraints; Mahavira added celibacy as a fifth vow. The Svetambara canon itself reports, in the Kesi and Gautama dialogue of the Uttaradhyayana Sutra, that his rule dispensed with clothing where Parshva's permitted it, and the same passage records the two lineages negotiating a merger.

Rishabhanatha, or Adinatha, the first Tirthankara of this cycle, is credited with teaching agriculture, writing, law and the arts before renouncing them all. Jain tradition holds he attained liberation on Ashtapada, identified with Mount Kailash; see Mount Kailash: History, Alignments and Spiritual Significance. The rest are known only through hagiography, with lifespans and statures growing less plausible further back.

What are the five vows, and how do lay Jains keep them differently from monks?

Can you live this with a job, a family and a mortgage? Jainism says yes, scaled down.

The five vows are ahimsa, non-violence; satya, truthfulness; asteya, not taking what is not given; brahmacharya, chastity; and aparigraha, non-possession. Monks and nuns take them as mahavratas, great vows, without exception. Laypeople take the same five as anuvratas, small vows, scaled to a household and a business. The sravakacara literature, manuals of lay conduct, specifies each exception and line.

For laypeople, non-violence means no intentional killing, a vegetarian diet and no life-destroying trades, while allowing self-defense and the incidental harm of ordinary work. Truthfulness means no lie that causes harm, and silence where truth would. Non-stealing reaches past theft to tax evasion, adulteration and false weights. Chastity means fidelity within marriage. Non-possession means parigraha-parimana, a vow fixing a personal ceiling on wealth, land and goods, with any excess given away.

The lay path adds seven supplementary vows and a staircase of eleven stages, the pratimas, from basic right belief to a near-monastic renunciation some elderly laypeople take, so there is always a next step.

Monks and nuns own almost nothing, walk barefoot, refuse all vehicles, and beg food from lay households, accepting only what was already cooking. They pull out their hair by hand in the rite called kesh-lochan, counted as an austerity in itself, usually at least annually depending on order and sect. They stay in one place for the four monsoon months, 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 separates Digambara Jains from Svetambara Jains?

If two Jain friends of yours practice quite differently, their families may belong to different sects.

Digambara and Svetambara first split over whether a monk may wear clothes. Digambara means sky-clad: fully ordained monks go naked, arguing that any possession, clothing included, is attachment, and that Mahavira went unclothed. Svetambara means white-clad: monks and nuns wear simple white robes, holding that Mahavira permitted clothing and nudity is unnecessary.

The differences reach doctrine. 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 must be reborn male to finish the work. Svetambaras reject this and hold that the nineteenth Tirthankara, Malli, was a woman; Digambaras record a man named Mallinatha.

Scripture divides them too. Svetambaras preserve a canon of Agamas redacted at Valabhi in the fifth century CE. Digambaras hold the original teaching was lost and rely on later systematic works, chiefly the Satkhandagama and the writings of Kundakunda.

The split came by slow drift, not one dramatic schism. Jain tradition traces it to a famine in Magadha under the Mauryas, when part of the community went south under Bhadrabahu and returned to find practice at home had loosened. Historians see a retrospective explanation and a division hardening over the first several centuries CE; Digambaras date the formal break to the first century.

Both sects have subsects. Among Svetambaras, the Murtipujaka worship images in temples, while the Sthanakvasi, from a fifteenth-century reform led by Lonka Shah, reject image worship and meet in plain halls. The Terapanth, founded in 1760 by Acharya Bhikshu, split from the Sthanakvasi and unusually places the whole order under one acharya. Digambaras concentrate in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, Svetambaras in Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Why do Jains avoid root vegetables, and what does a Jain diet include?

Back to that lunch: here is why your coworker skipped the potatoes.

Harvesting a root kills the whole plant, unlike picking fruit or leaves; Jain biology classes roots and tubers as ananta-kaya, bodies housing unlimited souls; and pulling roots disturbs soil crowded with one-sensed beings. The strict diet excludes potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, radishes, beets, ginger and turmeric, so Jain cooking uses asafoetida in place of onion and garlic and takes heat from pepper.

Jains are lacto-vegetarian: no meat, fish or eggs, but milk is accepted on the old 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 strained through cloth, the residue returned 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. The strictest diet belongs to monastics and to the devout at festivals. Many Jains in India and the diaspora eat potatoes and onions without much inner conflict; others keep the full rule only during Paryushana or on particular lunar dates.

Dairy is now debated. Younger Jains in North America and Britain note that industrial dairy kills male calves and sends spent cows to slaughter, voiding the old assumption, and a visible Jain vegan movement has grown from this. More traditional voices resist, since ghee and milk are woven into ritual.

Fasting is its own discipline. The Jain calendar is dense with fast days, and laypeople, women more often than men, undertake multi-day fasts on water alone during Paryushana. If you are drawn to try any extended fast yourself, talk to a doctor first.

What is anekantavada, and why do Jains refuse to claim one final answer?

Ever been sure you were right in an argument, then realized the other person saw something you missed? Jainism turns that moment into a doctrine.

Anekantavada, non-one-sidedness, holds that reality has many aspects and no single statement captures them all, so every claim is true only from its standpoint. It shares a source with Jain ethics: an absolute claim is itself violence, wiping out the partial truth of everyone who sees differently. Humility here is a vow, not a temperament.

It has two technical arms. Nayavada analyzes standpoints, such as a thing's underlying substance, its current mode, or its name. Syadvada is conditioned assertion: every proposition takes the prefix syat, in some respect, and Jain logicians built a sevenfold scheme in which a thing can be said to be, not to be, both, inexpressible, and combinations of these.

The stock illustration is the blind men and the elephant: each report is accurate about what it touched and wrong about the whole.

An early objection: is anekantavada itself conditional? Shankara pressed a version in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, arguing that a doctrine letting a thing both be and not be has said nothing at all. Jain logicians replied that the doctrine governs descriptions rather than standing among them, so it does not turn on itself.

Method mattered more. Jain writers set out rival positions at length, in the opponent's vocabulary, before answering. So Haribhadra's eighth-century Shaddarshanasamuccaya, a compact survey of six Indian schools written from outside most of them, still shows how those positions looked to a contemporary, including the materialist Carvaka school, whose own texts are lost.

A religion committed to the partiality of its own statements also had little appetite for conversion. Jains debate whether that bred real tolerance or a comfortable way to avoid the argument.

What does Jain practice look like day to day, and what is sallekhana?

If you long for a spiritual life you do each morning and evening, not just think about, here is a devout Jain day.

It rests on six essentials, the avashyakas. Samayika: forty-eight minutes of seated equanimity, renouncing all harmful activity. Chaturvimshati-stava: praise of the twenty-four Tirthankaras. Vandana: reverence to one's teachers. Pratikramana: a formal review of the day's faults from a fixed liturgy, much longer on festival days. Kayotsarga: standing or seated, letting go of identification with the body. Pratyakhyana: a renunciation vow for the day ahead, usually about food.

Add temple visits, image bathing and offerings for Murtipujaka Jains, set fast days, and giving to monastic and charitable causes. The year turns on Paryushana, eight days for Svetambaras, or Das Lakshana, ten for Digambaras, each ending in a forgiveness day, Samvatsari or Kshamavani, 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 hardest for outsiders to accept, and strictly bounded. Death must already be near through terminal illness, extreme age or incapacity. The vow is closed to anyone seeking escape from suffering, debt or disgrace. It needs a teacher's consent, a settled and passionless mind, and gradual withdrawal from food, then water. Jains distinguish it from suicide, which is driven by passion, while sallekhana is defined by passion's absence.

In August 2015 the Rajasthan High Court ruled sallekhana illegal, equating it with attempted suicide. The Supreme Court of India stayed that judgment later that month after nationwide Jain protest; the practice continues while the 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. If this touches something painful, or you are having thoughts of ending your life, please reach out to a doctor, a local crisis line or someone you trust.

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