Mahāvīra

Key ideas

1. Ahiṃsā. No living being is to be harmed in act, word or thought, and the early texts call this the pure, unchangeable, eternal law. Because the Jains count souls in plants and in earth, water, fire and air, the rule demands extreme care in everyday life.
2. The soul. Every living being embodies an eternal soul (jīva) whose nature is consciousness. The universe is eternal and uncreated, there is no creator god, and the gods themselves are subject to karma and rebirth.
3. Karma as matter. Karma is a subtle matter that clings to the soul through passions and obscures its knowledge. Bondage is this mixture of soul and matter; liberation is their separation, reached by stopping the influx of new karma and wearing away the old.
4. The five vows. Monks and nuns keep five great vows: non-violence, truthfulness, not taking what is not given, chastity and non-attachment. Householders keep them in modified forms. Ahiṃsā was already part of the fourfold restraint kept by the followers of Pārśvanātha, so Mahāvīra did not invent it.
5. Many-sidedness. Reality has many aspects, so a single statement captures only one of them. Asked in the Bhagavatī Sūtra whether the soul is eternal, Mahāvīra answers that it is eternal in respect of its substance and non-eternal in respect of its changing states; the later name for the method is anekāntavāda.
6. Standpoints and 'perhaps'. Later Jain thinkers turned that method into the doctrine of standpoints (naya) and a sevenfold logic of qualified statements, each marked by syāt, ‘perhaps’ or ‘from a standpoint’. These formal doctrines are credited to writers such as Siddhasena, Samantabhadra and Haribhadra, not to Mahāvīra himself.
7. Liberation as omniscience. A soul freed from karma is omniscient (kevala jñāna) and abides liberated. Tradition says Mahāvīra reached omniscience after twelve and a half years of austerities and then taught for thirty years.

Mahāvīra (Mahavira, “great hero”; also Mahavir, born Vardhamāna) was an Indian ascetic of the sixth or fifth century BCE, whom Jains revere as the twenty-fourth and last Tīrthaṅkara, or “ford-maker”, of the present age. Jain tradition holds that the teaching is eternal and that he founded nothing; historians usually see him as the reformer of an existing community of ascetics. His teaching of non-violence, of a soul bound by karma, and of the many-sidedness of reality is the base of Jain philosophy.

When did he live, and what do we know of his life?

The Śvetāmbara tradition gives 599–527 BCE; the Digambaras agree on his birth but date his death to 510 BCE. Many historians put him later, because his dates depend on those of the Buddha, a slightly younger contemporary whose own dates are now often lowered: some place Mahāvīra’s death c. 477 or 468 BCE, others as late as c. 425 BCE. Paul Dundas cautions that a historical Mahāvīra can hardly be reached apart from the texts that describe him.

By tradition he was born near Vaiśālī in Bihar, to a royal family of the Nāya clan, left home at about thirty, practised austerities for twelve and a half years, attained omniscience, taught for thirty years and died at Pāvā aged seventy-two. The Śvetāmbaras say he married; the Digambaras say he did not. Other accounts are legend, such as the gods anointing the infant on Mount Meru. Buddhist texts know him as Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta, one of the rival teachers of the Buddha’s day.

What did he teach about the soul and karma?

Every living being, on the Jain view, is the embodiment of an eternal soul whose nature is consciousness. Karma is a subtle matter that clings to the soul through passions and obscures its knowledge, binding it to saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth. Liberation is the separation of soul from karmic matter, and the freed soul is omniscient. There is no creator; the universe is eternal.

Why does non-violence come first?

If souls inhabit not only animals and people but plants and the bodies of earth, water, fire and air, harm is everywhere, and restraint has to be thorough. The Ācārāṅga Sūtra says, in Hermann Jacobi’s translation, that “all breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away”. Ahiṃsā is the first of five vows, with truthfulness, not taking what is not given, chastity and non-attachment; the ethics of the tradition are surveyed under Indian ethics.

What is many-sidedness?

Asked in the Bhagavatī Sūtra whether the world and the soul are eternal, Mahāvīra answers that each is both: the soul is eternal in respect of its substance, since it never ceases to exist, and non-eternal in respect of its states, as it passes from animal to human to god. The Stanford Encyclopedia reads this as no contradiction, since he states the respect in which each answer is true.

The word anekāntavāda is not in the earliest texts, but the method is. Later thinkers made it explicit: the doctrine of standpoints (naya), and syādvāda, a sevenfold scheme of qualified statements. The blind men and the elephant is often used to illustrate it. Critics, among them Śaṅkara, charged it with inconsistency, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes the worry that the doctrine is self-defeating. Dundas warns against reading it as a charter for tolerance; the monastic vows themselves admit no “perhaps”.

What did he write?

He wrote nothing. By tradition his chief disciple Indrabhūti Gautama compiled his teaching as the Āgamas, the Jain canon, which the tradition says began to be lost after a famine in Magadha. The Śvetāmbara and Digambara traditions hold different, incomplete versions, and the Digambaras rely chiefly on later texts such as the Ṣaṭkhaṇḍāgama. The oldest layers, such as the Ācārāṅga, are dated by the Stanford Encyclopedia to about the fourth and third centuries BCE. Systematic philosophy comes later, in Sanskrit, with the Tattvārtha Sūtra of Umāsvāti. This Gautama is neither the Buddha nor Akṣapāda Gautama of Nyāya.

How should you start reading Mahāvīra?

Read the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Jaina philosophy, then the Ācārāṅga, Book I, Lecture 4, and the Kalpa Sūtra’s life of Mahāvīra, both in Jacobi’s translation. For a medieval Hindu summary of the Jain system, the chapter on the Árhata system in Mādhava’s Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha (Cowell and Gough, 1882) is free. The page on the Buddha gives his contemporary’s side.