🚀 go-pugleaf

I wanted to correct (if that is not too harsh a term) the explanation
of ahimsa in Fred Welden's excellent post on "Theme - moral".  Since
this is not really relevant to misc.writing, I think any further
correspondence should be by e-mail.

In article <BxIBD6.45x@unx.sas.com>, sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com (Fred
Welden) writes:
|> 
|> [Ahimsa is an Indian philosophy that holds all life sacred and dictates
|> that its practitioners go to heroic lengths to avoid killing anything.

This is not completely correct.  "Ahimsa" can be translated literally
as "non-violence" ("a" = non; "himsa" = violence) and is a principle, not
a philosophy.  It is possible to have more than one philosophy based on
ahimsa; the example you have quoted is a particular Jain philosophy (I
am not familiar enough with Jain philosophies to tell you what the name
is).  Mahatma Gandhi, for example, believed in ahimsa but did not sweep
the ground while walking, since he accepted the principle but had a
different philosophy.  In fact, the principle is accepted in general by
Hindus and Buddhists as well, but your example is not.

Your statement of the principle may also be inaccurate.  I believe that
the prohibition is against not harming or not causing pain to any living
being (there are actually two variants here).  In any case, the prohibition
is more general than "not killing anything".  Also, the prohibition does
not necessarily imply that life is sacred; in fact, in some philosophies,
division of things into "sacred" and "non-sacred" is meaningless; and other
philosophies believe that in some sense, everything is alive. 

|> They must
|> either be unaware of, or try not to think of, what goes on all the time
|> in their own bodies--their immune systems and their colons.]

This is also not quite correct.  I am not completely familiar with these
philosophies, but I believe that they accept that complete non-violence
is impossible.  Towards the end of one's life, one is expected to do
penance for all the inadvertant violence one has committed.  

Dinkar