Jainism

What it is

An ancient Indian tradition centred on ahiṃsā — non-violence — pursued more rigorously than in any other religion, and on the liberation of the soul from the matter that binds it.

Jainism has no creator god. The universe is eternal and uncreated, operating by its own laws. What it has instead are Tīrthaṅkaras — ford-makers, twenty-four in the present cycle, who achieved liberation and taught the way across. They are venerated but they do not intervene; they are examples rather than saviours.

Its three defining doctrines:

Ahiṃsā — non-harm to any living being, understood to include not only animals but insects, plants and, in Jain cosmology, elemental beings in earth, water, fire and air.

Anekāntavāda — the many-sidedness of reality. No single viewpoint captures the whole truth of anything; every statement is true only from a particular standpoint. The parable of the blind men and the elephant, familiar in the West as a generic story about tolerance, is one of the tradition's own illustrations of this doctrine.

Aparigraha — non-possession, non-attachment, the limitation of what one holds.

Where it came from

Jains regard the tradition as beginningless. Historically, Mahāvīra — the twenty-fourth Tīrthaṅkara, a contemporary of the Buddha, conventionally dated to the fifth century BCE — is the figure through whom the present teaching comes. The twenty-third, Pārśvanātha, is generally accepted by historians as a real figure of perhaps the eighth century BCE, which makes Jainism older than Buddhism rather than an offshoot of it.

Karma in Jainism is physical, and this is distinctive. It is a subtle material substance that adheres to the soul as a result of action, weighing it down and binding it to rebirth. Liberation therefore requires both stopping the influx of new karma and burning off what has accumulated — which is why Jain asceticism is as severe as it is.

The tradition divided around the first centuries CE into Digambara — sky-clad, whose most advanced monks renounce clothing entirely — and Śvetāmbara, white-clad. They disagree on monastic practice, on the canonical texts, and on whether a woman can attain liberation without being reborn male.

How it is practised

By five vows, taken partially by laypeople and completely by monastics: non-violence, truth, non-stealing, celibacy or chastity, and non-possession.

In daily life this produces: strict vegetarianism, universal among observant Jains; avoidance of root vegetables by many, since harvesting them kills the whole plant and the organisms in the soil; filtering water; and, among some monastics, wearing a cloth over the mouth to avoid inhaling small creatures and sweeping the ground ahead when walking.

Occupations that cause harm — farming, which kills soil organisms; anything involving animals — have historically been avoided, which is part of why Jain communities concentrated in trade, finance and the professions.

Sallekhanā, the ritual fast to death undertaken at the end of life, is a formal religious practice with detailed conditions. Its legal status in India has been contested: the Rajasthan High Court ruled it suicide in 2015, and the Supreme Court stayed that judgment. Jains distinguish it sharply from suicide, arguing that it is undertaken calmly, without aversion to life, and only when death is already near.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the influence on the twentieth century is enormous and under-credited. Gandhi grew up in Gujarat in close contact with Jain teachers, and has written about the influence of Jain ahiṃsā on his thought. His satyāgraha — and its emphasis on holding truth without violence, and on the recognition that opponents hold partial truths, which is anekāntavāda in political form — shaped the Indian independence movement, and from there Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement, and Mandela and others afterwards.

A tradition of five million people is responsible, by this route, for a substantial share of the twentieth century's non-violent political change. Very few people who invoke non-violence know where it came from.

We can say anekāntavāda is philosophically serious and is not the same as relativism. The claim is not that all views are equally true but that reality exceeds any single description, so every assertion must be qualified by the standpoint it is made from. It is the most sophisticated resource in this section for the question raised under perennialism and constructivism — and it gives a different answer from either.

We can say the asceticism is genuinely severe and that Jainism does not soften it for outsiders.

We cannot say much about the internal life of a tradition that has remained small, largely endogamous and generally uninterested in explaining itself abroad.

Further reading

• Paul Dundas, The Jains (2nd ed., 2002) — the standard scholarly account.
• The Tattvārtha Sūtra, accepted by both major sects — the closest thing to a shared summary.
• Jeffery Long, Jainism: An Introduction (2009).