Jain Sutras

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Unlike the texts of the Brahmins, which were composed in the scholarly language of Sanskrit, and the Buddhist texts, composed in the related language of Pali, the Acaranga Sutra was written in Ardhamagadhi, one of the many vernacular tongues, called Prakrits, that common people used in ancient India. The Jain Sutras were written in numerous Prakrits, including several South Indian languages unrelated to Sanskrit. The fact that the texts were composed in commonly spoken, nonliturgical language made them easily accessible and popular with the merchant class that was quickly growing throughout the subcontinent, facilitating the spread of Jainist ideas. The following two lectures are the first of the twenty-four lectures that make up the Acaranga Sutra. The text is aimed at Jain monks and nuns and lays out the proper mindset and actions for one who wishes to follow the path of asceticism. Parenthetical wording in the document text indicates passages where the translator has supplied contextual meaning that does not explicitly appear in the text.

First Lecture: “Knowledge of the Weapon”

First Lesson

The text is organized systematically in a series of lectures that lay out what Mahavira sees as the diagnosis of the disease that is human existence. The text of each lecture is broken up into numbered verses. In this first lecture, the text makes clear that Mahavira’s disciple Sudharman is relating one of the master’s speeches to his own disciple, Gambusvamin. Thus, Mahavira may be effectively considered the speaker (though Sudharman refers to him within the text as “the Revered One”). In calling the lesson “Knowledge of the Weapon,” Mahavira emphasizes the destructive aspects of actions performed by ignorant people who do not understand the consequences.

Before he introduces his theory on consequential action, Mahavira establishes the doctrine of reincarnation in verses 2–4. Whenever a being acquires karmic debt by causing some harm, time is added to his existence so that he can remain to suffer consequences. This was a common idea in ancient India, but Mahavira also taught that many who retreated into the woods and abstained from worldly life were false ascetics who were unintentionally acquiring karmic debt in ways they could not comprehend.

When Mahavira says in verse 5 that the wise man “believes in soul, believes in the world, believes in reward, believes in action,” he takes aim at two of his rival sects. The first is a philosophical Brahmin sect called the Advaita, or “Non-dualists,” who believe that the individual souls (atman) of beings are not individual at all but are parts of one universal, fundamental being called Brahmin. Thus, the Advaitas believe that there is no duality between the “soul” and the “world” and do not recognize the first two of the four conditions Mahavira lists. The second sect Mahavira is arguing against is Buddhism, which teaches that there is no permanent “soul” at all but only a collection of karmic impressions that undergo constant rebirth.

Offering an alternative to what he considers false teachings, Mahavira lists some important tenets of Jainism: that a soul separate from the body undergoes reincarnation, that everything in the universe has some kind of soul, and that a relationship between actions in the world (kriya) and karmic debt ties beings to the cycle of rebirth. But, as Mahavira concludes, “He who, in the world, comprehends and renounces these causes of sin, is called a reward-knowing sage.”

Second Lesson

Lest the reader be confused that the cycle of rebirth is somehow preferable to the complete extinction of the self, in the second lesson Mahavira hammers home his point that suffering and human existence are inextricably linked. In order to pursue the rigorous and austere Jain path, one must first be convinced that existence is suffering. In the ensuing verses, Mahavira explains what makes the Jain practice of nonviolence different from the practices of Brahmins, Buddhists, and other sects. The Jains believed that since everything in the universe has a soul, people are constantly harming things like soil, rocks, and the earth itself without realizing it as they go about their daily lives. Even Buddhist monks are still harming the earth in their daily lives and thus still laden with karmic debt.

Third Lesson

Having discussed the unintentional harm that false ascetics like the Buddhists do to the class of earthly beings, Mahavira moves on in the third lesson to the beings that live in water. But the lesson begins with a definition of the true ascetic as “he who acts rightly, who does pious work, who practises no deceit.” All three of these ideals are also common to Buddhism, but as the lessons continue, Mahavira continues to expose what he sees as the ways in which Buddhists only believe they are following these ideals.

As in the previous two lessons, Mahavira connects each of these individual teachings about the souls that exist in water to a belief in the self. In verse 3, he iterates the formula “He who denies the world (of water-bodies), denies the self; and he who denies the self, denies the world of (water-bodies).” Mahavira is insisting here that the teachings of Jainism be taken together as a whole, rather than piecemeal; what he is presenting is a totalizing worldview. This held great appeal for the masses, since it presented a democratic type of religion with the same rules for everyone, as opposed to the hierarchy of Brahminism. But it also appealed to the would-be emperors who were beginning to extend their rule over large parts of South Asia and pull together disparate regions under their centralized control. A universalizing religion goes hand in hand with imperial domination. But eventually it was Buddhism, not Jainism, that spread across Asia with the conversion of the Mauryan emperor Asoka in the third century BCE.

Jain thought, like other ancient Indian schools of thought, is very systematic in its approach. In keeping with this systematic way of thinking, Mahavira divides up the beings of the world into beings of earth, water, fire, air, and plants. He further subdivides each class of beings into three categories—sentient, insentient, and mixed. The insentient beings do not have souls, and one does not acquire karmic debt by harming them. But, long before science discovered microscopic organisms, Mahavira taught that there are more lives in the water than can be seen, leading him to declare in verse 7 that Jain monks, unlike their Buddhist counterparts, must strain water before they drink it or wash with it so that they will not accidentally kill anything.

Fourth Lesson

Having discussed the existence of earth beings and water beings, Mahavira moves on in lesson 4 to the class of fire beings. He also introduces what some scholars see as an early form of environmentalism in verse 3: “He who is unmindful of duty, and desiring of the qualities (that is, of the pleasure and profit which may be derived from the elements) is called the torment (of living beings). Knowing this, a wise man (resolves): ‘Now (I shall do) no more what I used to do wantonly before.’” Mahavira is arguing that those who seek to gain by exploiting earth, water, fire, and plant life without considering the harmful consequences of their actions are a torment to living beings. The word translated as “torment” is danda, which refers to a stick used to beat and punish wrongdoers.

Unlike earth beings, which live in the earth, and water beings, which live in the water, the fire beings discussed in this lesson seem not to be beings that live in fire but the insects that die as a result of carelessly built fires. In verse 6, Mahavira describes the fire beings as small insects and other creatures that live in the earth on which the fire is built, in the cow dung and wood used as fuel, and in the dry grass used as kindling, as well as the insects that may accidentally jump or fly into the fire.

Mahavira’s condemnation of the violence of fire is an indictment against the Brahmin cult of sacrifice. The Vedic rituals of sacrifice all depended on the sacred fire, personified by the god Agni, and the ritual building of the fire pit and lighting of the flame were among the most solemn Brahmin rituals. In addition, Brahmin males were required to keep a sacred fire going in their homes at all times from the day of their entrance into manhood. When Mahavira attacks fire, he is attacking the Brahmin religion.

Fifth Lesson

In keeping with the systematic nature of the Acaranga Sutra, the discussions of earth beings, water beings, and fire beings would be followed by air beings in order to complete the sequence of the four classical elements. Contrary to expectation, the next class of beings discussed is not air beings but plants. The reason for this, according to later commentators on the text, was to strengthen the argument by moving on to a class of beings that everyone recognized. In ancient India, the place of air in the elements was not as well established as that of fire, water, and earth, since the latter are visible, but air or wind is not.

While many ancient Indian ascetic groups advocated vegetarianism and abstaining from killing animals, the Jains were unique in arguing that it is also sinful to kill plants. Mahavira points out the parallels between plant and human life in verse 6, noting that both are born and age over time, can suffer injury, need food, and utlimately die and decay. He argues that plants have sentience based on the fact that they know the proper times to bloom and to drop their leaves. Mahavira also picks up the argument against the exploitation of natural resources, begun in the previous chapter, in verses 2 and 3, where he equates the desire for the material benefits of the elements to a whirlpool that sucks men again and again into the cycle of rebirth.

Sixth Lesson

The sixth lesson deals with the subject of killing animals. Mahavira begins with an eightfold division of animals according to the ways in which they are born. The final class, those born by reincarnation, includes not only human beings but also gods and hell beings. Jains acknowledge that a life filled with good deeds may result in being reborn in a heaven as a god, while a life of evil deeds will result in being reborn in a hell; neither of these states are permanent, and beings always return to the cycle of rebirth.

Mahavira goes on to argue that all beings feel pain and terror and so killing them for any reason, including sacrifice, is a sinful act. Like the discussion of fire in the fourth lesson, Mahavira’s condemnation of sacrifice is an argument aimed at his intellectual opponents, the Brahmins.

Seventh Lesson

The seventh lesson completes the elemental quartet with a discussion of wind beings; but the actual description of the wind beings in verse 4 is nothing more than a nearly word-for-word restatement of verse 6 in the lesson on fire beings. Mahavira makes the real point of this lesson in verses 6 and 7, when he says that those who consider themselves to be pious and ascetic but do not recognize the harm they do in their daily actions to the six kinds of beings described earlier are doomed to be reborn into the world of suffering.

Second Lecture: Conquest of the World

First Lesson

Keeping with the martial theme, the second lecture of the Acaranga Sutra is called “Conquest of the World,” which can be accomplished only through conquest of the self. In the Brahmin worldview, political power and spiritual authority are two separate domains, but Mahavira’s message equates the warrior values of his martial clan with the virtues of the ascetic.

Having discussed the nature of violence, Mahavira uses the second lecture to introduce a nonviolent way of conquest through renunciation. He begins by arguing that the pursuit of worldly pleasure and attachment to things leads inexorably to sorrow and suffering. But when a man waits until he is old and his senses fail him to realize that material pursuits are worthless and turn to asceticism, it is already too late. In ancient India it was not uncommon for a householder of any caste to become an ascetic late in life, giving up his possessions and allowing his sons to inherit before his death. This practice of retirement ensured that the lands would always be tended by able-bodied men, while the old could live on the donations of others. Yet in verse 5, Mahavira recommends that a man should begin ascetic pursuits while he is still young and strong enough to enjoy the pleasures of life he is renouncing.

Second Lesson

After recommending that young men pursue the road of self-denial and discipline that comes with being “houseless”—that is, a wandering monk—Mahavira warns them against the danger of following false teachers, by which he means Buddhists, Brahmins, and Ajivikas, the followers of his rival, Gosala. Likening the cycle of rebirth to a wide and treacherous sea, Mahavira says that the wise will cross to the other side by completely renouncing desire. But the ignorant will become trapped in the pursuit of wealth and pleasure, which always entails violence, or fall under the spell of priests who convince them that sponsoring sacrifices will remove their sins.

Third Lesson

In the third lesson, Mahavira attacks the hereditary privilege of the Brahmin’s caste system, writing in verse 1, “‘Frequently (I have been born) in a high family, frequently in a low one; I am not mean, nor noble. …’ Thus reflecting, who would brag about his family or about his glory?” Despite the fact that he was born into a powerful clan, Mahavira recognizes that over his multitude of past lives, he has taken the form of every type of being, from king to insect. And at all times he was equally trapped in the vicious cycle of rebirth because, as he says in verse 4, “there is nothing inaccessible for death.”

For Mahavira, those who delight in their noble birth are as deluded as those who work to acquire wealth. In verse 5, he describes the man who abuses labor animals and natural resources to become rich, only to have his fortune divided among his heirs upon his death or taken away by misfortune during his lifetime. The money he makes will be gone, but the karmic debt he accrues in acquiring that money will still cause his soul to suffer.

Fourth Lesson

The fourth lesson continues Mahavira’s portrayal of the ignorant man who seeks pleasure and enjoyment in the world, repeating the description of the uncertainties of wealth from the previous lesson. Like those of most Indian ascetics, Mahavira’s teachings contain a deep suspicion of the female gender, treating them as objects of sexual temptation for his overwhelmingly male audience. Warning against involvement with women in verse 3, Mahavira declares that expecting happiness from them leads men “to pain, to delusion, to death, to hell, to birth as hell-beings or brute beasts.” Returning to his martial metaphor in verse 4, Mahavira calls on Jain monks to be heroic in their resistance of the transitory pleasures of the world and steadfast in their adherence to strict self-denial and control of the passions.

Fifth Lesson

After describing the futility of clinging to the pleasures of this world in the third and fourth lessons, in the fifth lesson Mahavira proceeds to give monks some practical measures to adopt to avoid succumbing to desire and attachment. Beginning in verse 3, he lists the precepts for Jain monks to follow. They must not engage in commerce; they must not keep possessions, unless they are necessary items for their monastic practice, such as robes, walking sticks, and begging bowls; and they must accept donations and refusals to donate with the same indifference. The question of what is proper for a monk to keep was one of the points of contention that caused a rift between the Digambaras and the Svetambaras. Significantly, the Digambaras, who insisted upon nudity, rejected the legitimacy of this text, which says that monks may own robes.

In verse 5, Mahavira encourages monks to consider the loathsome nature of the body in order to quell their sexual desires and help them stop identifying themselves with their own physical shapes, which are impermanent. Finally, Mahavira warns again against trusting false teachers who profess to be able to alleviate desire.

Sixth Lesson

Those who understand the impermanence of the physical world and recognize the existence of the six kinds of beings listed in the first lecture, cautions Mahavira, have a higher level of responsibility than ignorant men. According to verse 1, if the wise man kills one kind of being, he will be as guilty as if he had killed all six kinds.

The Jain monk must accept good and bad with equanimity and reject the idea of property. Calling him “the hero,” Mahavira proclaims in verse 3 that the Jain monk must not tolerate lust or discontent, must remain unattached to objects, must despise and mortify his physical body, and must eat only the simplest of food. In the last verses, he describes the Jain monk as one who refrains from killing, by which he means killing any of the six beings, and who preaches the Jain message to anyone who will listen.