Jainism

Jainism holds that reality contains countless souls, that every one of them, human, animal, insect, and in some accounts plants and elemental beings, has moral standing, and that violence toward any of them binds the soul more tightly to the cycle of rebirth. Ahimsa, non-violence, follows from this as a metaphysical consequence rather than an ethical preference, and Jain practice pursues it further than any other tradition: vegetarianism as a floor, filtering water, avoiding root vegetables, sweeping the ground ahead of one’s feet, and, for the most rigorous monastics, a cloth over the mouth to avoid inhaling small organisms.

Mahavira, traditionally 599–527 BCE, is the twenty-fourth and last tirthankara of the current cycle; Jain tradition holds that the teaching is beginningless rather than founded. The two main orders, Digambara and Shvetambara, split in the early centuries CE over issues including monastic clothing and the question of whether women can achieve liberation.

The philosophical contribution most worth knowing is anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness. Reality is too complex for any single viewpoint to capture, so every statement about it is true only from a particular standpoint, and dogmatism is an epistemological error before it is a moral one. The Jain tradition illustrates this with the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which the Buddhists and the Vedantins also use, and whose origin is genuinely disputed, the earliest surviving version being in the Pali Udāna. The parable’s own point applies neatly to the argument about who owns it.

Jains constitute less than 0.5% of India’s population and have historically been concentrated in trade and finance, partly because agriculture involves unavoidable harm to soil organisms. Their influence on Indian thought, and directly on Gandhi, who grew up in Gujarat among Jains, is far out of proportion to their numbers.

Further reading: Paul Dundas, The Jains (2002).