Ahimsa

In Jain thought

Ahimsa is the first of the Jain vows and the ground of the rest. Its scope is unusually wide: Jain doctrine attributes souls not only to humans and animals but to plants and to the elemental bodies of earth, water, fire and air, so that no embodied existence can be free of harm. The tradition works therefore in degrees, distinguishing intentional from unintentional harm, and harm to beings with more senses from harm to beings with fewer.

From this follow the visible disciplines: the sweeping of the ground, the filtering of water, the avoidance of eating after dark, the exclusion of root vegetables from the diet, and the historic concentration of Jain communities in occupations that do not involve killing.

In Hindu and Buddhist thought

Ahimsa appears in the Upanishads and is listed among the yamas in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and it is the first of the Buddhist precepts. Its standing in these traditions is high but not absolute: Hindu texts weigh it against duty, so that a warrior's violence in a just cause may be defended, and the Bhagavad Gita is in part an argument of exactly this kind. Jain doctrine admits no such exception, which is the sharpest ethical difference between the traditions.

The historical relation runs the other way too. Scholars have argued that the spread of vegetarianism in Indian religion, and the decline of Vedic animal sacrifice, owe a great deal to sustained Jain and Buddhist pressure over centuries.

Modern political use

Gandhi took ahimsa as the basis of satyagraha, and was explicit about his debt to Jain influence in Gujarat, particularly to the thinker Shrimad Rajchandra. What he made of it was new: a technique of collective political action rather than an individual discipline, in which the willingness to accept suffering rather than inflict it was used to force a response. Through Gandhi the concept passed into wider twentieth-century political practice.