Session 2- Engaged Jainism

Often religions are critiqued as being disengaged from worldly concerns since their locus of value is often believed to be transcendental and otherworldly, causing practitioners to become complacent regarding important social issues, or even complicit with various forms of oppression and domination. This critique can dovetail with stereotypes about the Jain tradition being excessively world-denying, and therefore not providing viable paradigms for resistance against social injustices.

This paper will address these critiques from a Jain perspective by showing how key principles in the Jain faith, such as karma theory and metaphysical frameworks, can be employed in resistance to paradigms of violence and oppression. Understood like this, the Jain tradition does not require a turning away from the world. Rather, this paper argues, the practical and soteriological implications of the tradition may in some cases be best served by engaging with forms of  structural violence such as racism, sexism, colonialism, ecocide, animal exploitation, LGBTQ discrimination, etc.

Decades ago in Practical Ethics, Peter Singer issued the principle of the “equal consideration of interests,” whereby “we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions" because "an interest is an interest, whoever’s interest it may be.” Singer’s point is that we cannot deny appropriate moral consideration to a being’s interest simply because the being has been classified as, for example, “pig” and not “human.” Provided the relationship of sentience to interests—and interests to moral considerability—Alasdair Cochrane argues for “sentient rights” rather than "human rights" or “animal rights.” Singer’s and Cochrane’s emphases on sentience and interests rather than species classification—especially “being human”—are shared by a Jain text composed over two thousand years ago. The Tattvārtha Sūtra teaches that the practice of ethical decision-making initiates not from categories such as “species,” but rather from the differential vulnerabilities and capacities of sentient beings. This talk explores the problem of "species," the implausibility of speciesism, and how a perspective akin to “sentient rights” has existed in Jain traditions for millennia.

This paper seeks to revisit the Jain ethic of aparigraha (non-possession) to explore its potential harmonization with Mahātmā Gandhi’s model of Swarāj, of which Gandhi’s concepts of socio-economic system underline the dignity of an individual, decentralization, equality, and non-violence. By focusing on the Jain ethic of aparigraha, I aim to argue and propose that the Jain notion of non-possessiveness can be applied to economic sustainability, the dignity of life, and non-violence when it expands its philosophy to ethical choices. Putting together Gandhi’s economic model with Jain ethics, the paper explores applications of aparigraha to propose an opportunity for “ethical consumerism,” a model that encourages people to make choices of consumerism that strengthens the marginalized sections of an economic system amid the growing consumerism, globalization, and industrialization.

This paper aims to explore the dynamics of non-violence in the Jain tradition and challenge the dominant theories of non-violence that currently prevail in academic and international scholarship. While the non-killing of all sentient beings and the trilogy of war-violence-non-violence are widely accepted, there is a third area that requires scholarly attention - the distinction between non-violence for spiritual goals and non-violence for material goals. Drawing on the revolutionary theory of the founder of the Śvetāmbara Terāpanth tradition, this article questions whether sheltering animals has merit and whether protecting them fulfils the ultimate goal of ahiṃsā - the purification of the soul. Through various dṛṣtānta (illustrations), this paper presents a unique perspective on ahiṃsā that departs from the commonly accepted notions of non-violence.

Using examples from my work with the Jain community over the years, this paper demonstrates how the epistemes of modern science and Jain tradition sometimes conflict, leaving contemporary Jains to create a number of strategies to cope with these conflicts that often inadvertently cause epistemic harm toward peer-reviewed climate knowledge and/or actual physical harm to our climate itself. However, with some epistemic flexibility, I show how Jains can embrace modern climate science as a form of their own empirical knowledge (mati-jñāna) to enhance their understanding of how they can avoid harm to the climate. Helpful here is the Jain tool of naya-vāda, one tool of the anekāntavāda, which, as I show, can be instrumentalized by Jains to accommodate the episteme of modern science as a partially true empirical viewpoint (vyavahāra-naya). In this way, Jains and anyone wanting to live the Jain way of life can avoid both epistemic harm toward climate science and physical harm to the climate itself.