Jainism

Teaching

Jainism takes as its starting point a universe with no creator god. It is eternal and uncaused, running through cycles of ascent and decline without beginning or end. What it contains is an infinity of souls, each intrinsically omniscient and blissful, and each obscured by karma. Liberation is not a gift granted by a deity; it is a condition a soul reaches by exhausting its own karma.

Karma in Jain thought is not a moral ledger but a subtle physical substance. Action, and above all violent or passionate action, draws this matter to the soul and binds it there, weighing it down and clouding its knowledge. The discipline of the tradition follows directly from this account: stop the influx, and wear away what has already accumulated.

The three principles held to make this possible are called the three jewels — right faith, right knowledge and right conduct. None is sufficient alone. Together they describe a path in which what one believes, what one understands and how one behaves are treated as a single undertaking.

Non-violence

Ahimsa, non-harm, is the tradition's first and most demanding commitment. It is not confined to human beings, or to animals, but extends to every soul, including those Jains hold to inhabit plants, water, fire, air and earth. Since no embodied life can avoid harm entirely, the tradition works in degrees: the mendicant undertakes the full vow, the layperson a limited form of it.

The practical consequences are visible. Jain mendicants sweep the ground before them, filter water, and in some orders wear a cloth over the mouth. Jain lay diet excludes meat, and commonly root vegetables, whose harvesting kills the plant and the organisms in the soil. Historically the commitment shaped occupation as well: farming involves unavoidable killing, and Jain communities concentrated instead in trade, finance and later in law and industry.

The tirthankaras

Jains do not regard their tradition as founded. They hold that in each half-cycle of time twenty-four tirthankaras — ford-makers — appear, each rediscovering and teaching the same eternal truth. Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha in the fifth or sixth century BCE, was the twenty-fourth of the present cycle, not its originator.

Historians treat the last two as historical figures, with Parshvanatha placed roughly two and a half centuries before Mahavira. The remaining twenty-two belong to traditional chronology, with lifespans and statures that grow to enormous scale as the series recedes. Entries on those figures are accounts of what the tradition holds and how they are depicted, not biography.

Community and division

The tradition divided, over a period whose dating is uncertain, into two orders. The Digambara hold that a fully advanced mendicant renounces clothing entirely, that the original canon is lost, and that a woman cannot attain liberation in her present birth. The Svetambara mendicants wear white, preserve a canon they trace to a council at Valabhi, and hold that women can be liberated — indeed that the nineteenth tirthankara was one.

Jains have never been numerous. The Indian census records a population of a few million, concentrated in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Karnataka, with a substantial diaspora. Their influence has been out of proportion to that number, through wealth directed at temple building and manuscript libraries, through a scholarly tradition in logic and mathematics, and through the transmission of ahimsa into wider Indian thought.

Study

Jainism was long treated in Western scholarship as an offshoot of Buddhism or a heterodox branch of Hinduism, an error corrected in the twentieth century. Its texts remained less studied than Buddhist ones, partly because much material sits in temple libraries with restricted access. Jain manuscript collections at Patan, Jaisalmer and Moodbidri preserve works that survive nowhere else, including non-Jain texts copied by Jain scribes.