Nonviolence and partial perspectives

Whose life enters the calculation?

Imagine a gardener who finds insects eating a young tree. Saving the tree seems to mean killing the insects, while leaving them alone may destroy something else that is alive. The problem only gets harder once more than human convenience enters the calculation.

The gardener’s dilemma opens onto a Jain question: how should we act in a world filled with living beings, when our actions can injure them and bind us more closely to that world? The Jain answer depends on an account of what living beings are, and also on learning to see more than one aspect of a situation.

Our main text is the Tattvārtha Sūtra, a concise Sanskrit account attributed to Umāsvāti, also called Umāsvāmī. Nalini Balbir places its probable composition between the second and fifth centuries CE. It systematizes an older tradition rather than transcribing Mahāvīra’s teaching. Both major Jain traditions, the Śvetāmbara and the Digambara, recognize its authority, though they preserve different versions and interpretations of it. We will use K. K. Dixit’s translation, which includes Pandit Sukhlalji’s commentary. [1] [2]

A living being can change and endure

Jīva means a living or conscious being, and is often translated as soul. In the account we are reading, consciousness is what distinguishes a jīva from what is not alive. There are many souls; each endures through changing conditions, and each may be bound or liberated. Living beings include plants as well as animals, and the text’s classifications also include earth-bodied and water-bodied beings, so its account of life does not simply reproduce modern biology. [1]

This is a different position from the not-self argument of lesson 7. There, none of the five aggregates, the bodily and mental groupings used to analyze experience, could serve as a secure self. Here, changes in experience and embodiment belong to an enduring jīva: change does not exhaust what a being is.

Sūtra 5.29 describes reality in terms of arising, passing away and persistence. A new condition appears, an earlier one disappears, and something continues through the change. The commentary distinguishes a substance, what endures, from its changing states. That is a philosophical claim about reality, and a stronger one than the familiar observation that things change. [1]

Consider the gardener’s tree. It has grown new leaves and lost old ones, yet the gardener calls it the same tree. The example makes change alongside continuity easy to picture, though it cannot prove the Jain account of an enduring soul or settle every hard case of identity.

Why conduct matters to liberation

In earlier lessons, karma referred broadly to action and its consequences. The Jain account gives karmic bondage a more specific form. Activity of body, speech and mind lets karmic matter flow in, and the passions help bind it to the soul. The claim concerns subtle material particles; it is not a metaphor for a guilty conscience. The commentary describes both how the particles attach and the mental conditions associated with bondage. [1]

This makes conduct part of the explanation of our condition. The text names false understanding, lack of restraint, negligence, passion and activity as causes of bondage. Anger and attachment matter because they affect how action binds the person who acts, and simply deciding to believe something different would leave those causes in place.

The opening sūtra joins right orientation, right knowledge and right conduct as the way to liberation, freedom from karmic bondage and rebirth. “Orientation” here includes accepting the realities the text teaches, which asks more of us than keeping an open mind. Later passages distinguish two tasks, preventing new karmic inflow and shedding karma already bound, and complete release requires both. [1]

The ethical question therefore has two sides: the beings who may be injured, and the agents whose conduct sustains or loosens their own bondage. We need not accept the account of karmic matter to understand this connection. We need only see why it puts nonviolence near the center of the argument.

Nonviolence requires attention

Ahiṃsā means nonviolence or non-injury. The text places it among vows that also concern truthfulness, theft, sexuality and possessiveness, and it distinguishes partial vows from comprehensive ones: Jain householders and ascetics do not take on identical disciplines. [1] [2]

The definition of violence in this edition’s 7.8 ties injury to negligent activity, and Sukhlalji’s explanation counts attachment and aversion as part of that negligence. So the concern reaches beyond the intention “I want to hurt this being.” Carelessness matters too. We may need to notice what a convenient action does to lives we have barely considered. [1]

None of this makes the gardener’s conflict vanish. Caring about both the insects and the tree doesn’t, by itself, tell us which response is justified. What the example exposes is how far the concern reaches; it supplies no rule of Jain practice. And the distinction between vows keeps us from treating one ascetic ideal as a description of every Jain life.

Partial does not mean equally true

Anekāntavāda, or many-sidedness, holds that reality cannot be exhausted by a single aspect. A naya is a standpoint that brings one particular aspect into view. Sūtra 1.6 names both means of knowledge and standpoints, and Jeffery D. Long explains how that sūtra, together with the account of change and persistence, laid foundations for later Jain formulations of many-sidedness. We should not read the full later doctrine back into every early sentence. [1] [3]

“The tree persists” and “the tree changes” can both be true, once we say what persists and what changes. But “This tree has no leaves” is false if the tree has leaves at the time in question, and calling it a perspective does not rescue it. A partial description earns its truth by describing something that is there.

The doctrine therefore keeps a demanding idea of truth. Jain accounts grant comprehensive knowledge to an omniscient knower, and ordinary perspectives fall short of that ideal; they do not make reality whatever anyone wishes it to be. Long also warns against telling the doctrine’s history simply as nonviolence carried over into debate. It has served arguments for the superiority of Jain explanations as well as modern appeals to openness. [3]

Pause and try

A reader argues, “Every description is partial, so the claim that an action injures living beings is no truer than the claim that it injures none.” What has gone wrong? Explain why conduct still matters within the Jain account we have read.

Read an explanatory answer

The reader has confused being partial with being no truer than the alternative. A standpoint selects an aspect of something; it cannot make an unsupported statement true, so we still have to ask which beings are affected and what the action does to them. Within the Jain account, negligent and passionate activity can injure others and sustain the agent’s karmic bondage, and preventing and shedding that bondage is what connects conduct with liberation. None of this follows from accepting every opinion as equally good.

Carry this forward

We can admit the limits of any description without giving up the distinction between knowledge and error. The next lesson turns to Nyāya, which asks how a perception, an inference or another person’s words can warrant a belief.

Sources and limits

[1] Umāsvāti, Tattvārtha Sūtra with Pandit Sukhlalji’s commentary, translated by K. K. Dixit, L. D. Institute of Indology, second edition 2000 (first edition 1974), for the account of living beings, karmic bondage, the vows and standpoints.

• Sūtras read: selected English sūtras, with their accompanying explanation, at 1.1, 1.4, 1.6; 2.8, 2.10–14; 5.29–30; 6.1–2; 7.1–2, 7.8; 8.1–3; 9.1–3; and 10.2–3. The commentary was read selectively, not in full for every numbered passage.
• Printed pages: 4, 10, 14, 79, 81–82, 84–86, 202–204, 223–224, 251–253, 260–261, 290–291, 293–294, 311–312 and 356.

Chapter and sūtra numbers follow this edition’s Śvetāmbara-based presentation, which records other readings, and numbering differs across editions: the definition of violence is 7.8, printed p. 260 here. Dixit uses “right inclination” for samyag-darśana; “right orientation” above is an explanatory paraphrase. Neither independent Sanskrit analysis nor a full sectarian collation (a comparison of the versions preserved by the different Jain traditions) was undertaken.

[2] Nalini Balbir, “Tattvārtha-sūtra”, JAINpedia, for the text’s date, authorship and standing in both traditions. The article’s substantive sections were read, including those on author and date, contents, sectarian versions and commentaries. They support the approximate dating and the shared authority without erasing textual differences. The gardener and the tree are original examples.

[3] Jeffery D. Long, “Anekāntavāda, Nayavāda, and Syādvāda: The history and significance of the Jaina doctrines of relativity,” chapter 39 in History of Indian Philosophy, edited by Purushottama Bilimoria, Routledge, 2018, for the history of many-sidedness. The Introduction, “Relativity in the Śvetāmbara Āgamas” and “Metaphysical foundations of relativity in Umāsvāti’s Tattvārtha Sūtra” were read in full; later thinkers’ systems were not surveyed. The lesson follows Long’s distinction between limited standpoints and unrestricted relativism, but not his comparison with modern physics.