Ahimsa (nonviolence)

Ahimsa is shared by the Indian traditions, but they do not mean the same thing by it, and Jainism is where the principle is carried to its logical end.

Jain doctrine holds that souls inhabit not only animals but plants, and elemental bodies in earth, water, fire and air, graded by the number of senses each possesses. Harm to any of them binds karma, understood in Jainism as a physical substance adhering to the soul rather than as a moral ledger. The consequences are worked out in detail. Jain monastics sweep the ground ahead of them with a soft brush, filter water, avoid travelling at night when insects cannot be seen, neither light nor extinguish fire, and in the Digambara tradition eat once a day from cupped hands. Lay Jains keep a lesser vow: strict vegetarianism that also excludes root vegetables, because uprooting a plant kills it along with the organisms in the soil, and often excludes honey and figs. Many also avoid eating after dark.

The occupational consequence is historically large. Agriculture involves unavoidable killing, so Jains moved into trade, finance and later the gem and textile businesses, and the community's commercial position in western India is a direct result of a doctrine about insects.

Hindu ahimsa is a virtue held in tension with duty. The Bhagavad Gita is framed as an argument about exactly that tension, with Krishna instructing Arjuna that his obligation as a warrior stands, which is how Hindu tradition sustains both renunciant nonviolence and a martial ethic without treating the pair as a contradiction.

Buddhist practice makes non-harming the first precept and does not extend it to plants. Under the traditional monastic rule a monk may eat meat if the animal was not killed specifically for him, which is why Theravada monastics in Thailand and Sri Lanka are commonly not vegetarian while Mahayana monastics in China commonly are.

The transfer of ahimsa from personal discipline to political method is a twentieth-century development, and Gandhi is the reason for it.

Gandhi grew up in Gujarat in close contact with Jain teaching; his mother's practice and an early Jain mentor are documented influences. He combined that inheritance with the Sermon on the Mount, with Tolstoy and with Thoreau, and produced satyagraha, holding to truth: the deliberate acceptance of suffering without retaliation, in order to make an opponent's use of force publicly untenable. It is a technique with rules rather than a mood. Participants were trained, required to maintain discipline under attack, forbidden to exploit an opponent's difficulty, and expected to remain willing to negotiate throughout.

Two things about it are routinely misdescribed. First, Gandhi did not present it as passivity, and stated plainly that violent resistance was preferable to cowardice. Second, its record is mixed rather than triumphal. It worked against a British administration constrained by its own domestic politics and its own press, and historians continue to argue over how much Indian independence owed to satyagraha, how much to Britain's exhaustion after 1945, and how much to other pressures including armed resistance elsewhere in the movement.

The transmission onward is well documented. Martin Luther King studied Gandhian method directly and travelled to India in 1959, and the American civil rights movement adopted the training, the discipline and the deliberate courting of visible brutality before cameras. Later movements in South Africa, Eastern Europe and elsewhere borrowed the same repertoire, generally without any of the metaphysics. The comparative point worth holding onto is that a doctrine developed to avoid harming insects became, by a traceable route through one man's reading, the standard technique of unarmed mass politics worldwide.