Transcript for:
Introduction to Jainism

okay now it's time to move on to our next world religion Jainism and so notice that Jainism is a smaller religion there's only about six million people who practice this religion worldwide most of them live in India but there are actually quite a few who lived in the Chicagoland area so we oftentimes go to the Jain temple for our world religions field trip so I can actually discuss this in just one lecture now whenever I describe the founder of religion you need to know who that person is we don't have necessarily a founder to Hinduism because that kind of predates the written record but you know many people might say it's Krishna or or one of the incarnations of Vishnu it's kind of hard to really say who actually started Hinduism so I'll just leave that open as a question for debate but in Jainism I'm going to tribute the founder as a person by the name of Mehta pooted vard homina I know that's like a hard name to say but in India a lot of people's names are very long and it's just a characteristically sanskrit way of describing people so you need to know who that person is because i'm going to call him the founder of Jainism even though that too is a matter of some debate as you'll see in just a minute so not a part of our homina is the founder but most of his followers actually refer to him as Mahavira and that just means the great one so actually refer to him as Mahavira since that's what most genes actually call him by and it kind of characterizes his title kind of like the Buddha right as a title for the person known as Siddhartha Gautama will just refer to not a Buddha part homina as Mahavira makes it a little bit simpler and it rolls off the tongue a little bit easier when Mahavira was growing up in India he was obviously raised in the Hindu caste system he was a warrior Noble so that's saying a lot that use of such high prestige in the caste system and yet he started teaching a different religion as he was wandering around trying to seek enlightenment right this is during the axial age so people are much more concerned with their individual practice of faith and you know he may not have read bhagavad-gita is even just then being written during his lifetime so he's trying to figure out well how does a person reach enlightenment he was trying to explore the different paths and about 12 years later he finally had an experience of great liberation from pain suffering and shame now you may not think that's a big deal because you're probably thinking well I don't suffer a lot right there's not a lot of pain in life well that's because we live in America and we've actually overcome a lot of the problems that would be plaguing people 2,500 years ago think about what life was like in that era they didn't have automobiles to get around in they didn't have air conditioning or indoor plumbing they didn't even have toilet paper right can you even imagine living in a world without toilet paper they live in a world full of pain and suffering so for somebody to overcome that is saying something and that's probably the attraction to mahavira's teachings is that he's able to overcome these things and thus to teach other people as well and that's what leads to the religion of Jainism now because he was able to do that he is known by his followers as the jina and that just means the Conqueror I'm sorry this guy has a lot of titles and each one of them is relevant so you know forgive me for having to give you multiple titles for this guy the reason why I bring that title up is because that's actually where we get the the word for Jainism if you wonder why it doesn't why is this religion called Jainism is because J nu means follower of the jina and so therefore these are the people who follow the one who conquered pain and suffering and that that's where it gets its name now he's also known as a tear thumb guru again I'm sorry about so many titles here but at Earth Anka is a Sanskrit word that means a Ford finder that means he has a supernatural ability to find broken-down automobiles on the side of i90 a Ford finder actually refers to a metaphor that's actually used in a lot of Eastern religions to describe the process of trying to get to enlightenment a Ford is that shallow part in a river where it's safer to cross so you can imagine the Pioneers traveling across America need to find a way to get across the Rock River and you know the river can be treacherous at times especially if you're in a horse and wagon it's not easy to cross with a horse or wagon especially if the river is very deep so you look for the shallow is part of the river and that's the place where you would cross those shallow places in a river are called a ford and that's what rock ford is named after it's the shallowest part in The Rock River so therefore a Ford Finder is a person who has found that path so that you can cross the river and what that's doing is its conjugate that the Eastern religions all kind of use for their own purposes the allegory goes something like this imagine you're standing on the edge of a riverbank and let's say the forest behind you is on fire now fire represents suffering so it's like represented that this world represents suffering in our life right there's just a lot of pain involved in living but you you get to the precipice of the river and you realize the river is just flowing constantly the river represents time and inevitably it represents death because death is inevitable you can't stop the course of time and so you know if you were to stick your foot into the river the undertow might take you down and you know you crack your head on a rock and it's lights out right so therefore the river represents death but on the other side of the river you see that there's a forest that's not on fire it's paradise over there it's perfect and the question is how do you get across this raging river of time without you know without dying and so what you do is you find somebody who's found the shallowest place in a river to guide you on that path so Mahavira then is responsible for taking people by the hand and saying come with me and he shows them right step-by-step if you just put your foot on this rock here and you put your foot over here you can actually make your way across the river because he has been to the other side and that's the idea of a Ford finder teareth anchor is a person who has been to this enlightened state of paradise they call it Nirvana and therefore he can show the path to other people so that they too can achieve Nirvana and that's what Jainism is all about so he actually says he's not the first serum trait to have exist he says there are 23 other terrorists who came before him all teaching some version of Jainism and he actually lists who those people are now the problem is is that we don't have any archaeological evidence that any of these people existed except for maybe number 23 there is a genealogy from northern India about where Mahavira lived of a man named Parr Sava and he does name Parsa as the 23rd to thank are but Parsifal lived 300 years prior to himself right so and a poet of our hamona was born in $5.99 and died in 527 so therefore how what does he know what this guy parsha really taught we don't have any records of anyone in India teaching anything like Jainism prior to Mahavira so it just raises this question about does does a religion need evidence doesn't need proof or archaeological evidence to substantiate some of its claims or or does that matter this is one of the hottest debates in religious studies did Mahavira simply make up the stories about these other 23 to thank our us or did they really teach Jainism and we just never heard about it before there's no written records of it no scriptures there's not even hints coming from other authors talking about people who teach anything like Jainism so you know this debate kind of goes on in it it does raise some questions about Mijares teachings what makes it even more complicated as this some of the people that Mahavira lists as tear thunderous are names of Hindu gods so he actually talks about people like krishna or rama and says that these guys weren't hindu gods they were two they were enlightened humans who reached nirvana and taught Jainism not Hinduism so did the James get these I these names of these guys from the Hindus in other words there's my very someplace using some of his him due upbringing and using that to to build his religion of Jainism or did the Hindus steal those names from the Janes or did they both make it up it's it's not clear we just don't know who has the official story on those other 23 guys all that we know is that Mahavira started teaching this religion about 2,500 years ago and that's why and I'm going to assert that Mahavira is the founder of this religion even though James might say he's the 24th founder if you will and all the Janes follow his teachings so it's not like they're following all of the other two Thakur's but they do pay their respects to them as enlightened humans now when Mahavira achieved this great liberation he freed himself from the shackles of all materialism and wandered through india naked and so this is a statue kind of dedicated to the the enlightened gurus of Jainism saying you know that you should free yourself from this material world and that's kind of what chain ISM is teaching now you might be wondering what is this how is this different from Hinduism as a separate religion it does have a lot in common with Hinduism both religions believe in reincarnation both religions believe in karma and they both believe in enlightenment which Hindus call moksha and Jains called nirvana that the two concepts are very similar to one another and I'll explain this more in the next chapter on Buddhism but just think of Nirvana as that state of enlightened being it's it's a concept that means you become one with the universe but it doesn't necessarily imply that you become one with God like I said Buddhism is a non-theistic religion and Jainism is gonna have a very unique theistic position as well we'll get to that in a minute but the point is is that it has a lot in common with with Hinduism and so therefore what makes it different well one of the things that makes it uniquely different is that Mahavira actually rejected the caste system and that's saying a lot given that he was a warrior noble so he's that near the top of the caste system and yet he's claiming that everyone should be treated as equals why because he finds itself evident he says right religion doesn't require that some people are higher or lower than others he thinks that everyone should be treated as equals and he also notes that the caste system system is responsible for a lot of pain and suffering throughout the lands so he says that can't be right because he thinks that pain and suffering are the problem that we need to overcome so that's one of the first things he taught was an elimination of the caste system and genes do not follow the caste system in India today he also believed that reincarnation applies to all living beings not just humans and animals so you may remember me talking about this in Hinduism where the samsara wheel goes from humans to animals to insects anything that has consciousness Hindus regard as having an Atman and therefore they're worthy of reincarnation that you your Atman could be embodied in any one of those conscious beings but Maha veer is going one step further than that saying that you could be reincarnated as a tree or a plant a flower even as rocks water or fire so his wheel of samsara is much bigger right it's much broader especially at the base given how many different life-forms exist outside of the animal kingdom you can imagine that you could be reincarnated as a rock and and therefore you'd be trapped inside that rock body I guess until somebody smashes it or you know if the rock can die we'll talk about that in a minute but reincarnation applies to all beings of the universe not just humans and animals so that's a unique teaching he also believed that karma had a physical property to it like a residue that covers your skin that when you do good or bad deeds you get good or bad karma and you see a residue on your skin that kind of reflects that so if you do good deeds then you get this sort of bright shimmering residue that makes you glisten kind of like vampires in the Twilight series right but if you do something really bad then you get this sort of dark residue that coats your skin and kind of weighs you down it's really heavy now we can do experiments on this right science this would prove this to be false there is no residue that gets on a person whether they're a Jane or not that you can you know test this theory out and see is there really a residue from our good and bad actions and the answer is resoundingly no but if I could put the most positive spin to this is I can think of maybe what moverá is getting at is that morality has physiological effects on our bodies that it's not just some idea that somebody made up right there people making up good and evil and then calling it what it is he's saying that it actually has an effect on our bodies and therefore that it's not just a concept it's not abstract it's physical in nature after all whenever you do something good do you feel like you kind of maybe walk more of a bounce you know you kind of feel a little bit lighter like you're you're walking on air or have you ever done something so bad that you just felt like you wanted to crawl under a table and hide I was visiting one of my friends in California one summer when we decided to go out to one of the state parks she was dating a guy who will just call dick and so she and dick were taking me on to some of the state parks because I knew that I liked to go mountain climbing and they lived in LA so it's like at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and so you know you're looking at the mountains pretty much the whole time you're in LA and I was like is there any way we can go up there and then do I like to go hiking so they take me into this little crevice that is like a canyon that goes up to a waterfall where the water trickles down off the mountains and it forms this little waterfall that then creates a pool where people can go swimming and play and just have fun right there in the in the canyon and so we were down in the canyon and there's all these kids playing and everyone's having a great time and I'm like all right this is cool and all but is there any chance that we could get up onto the mountain and climb and see maybe they'll see the waterfall from above and they're like yeah we know of some past so they actually take me up this this path where you've got the mountain on one side you got this cliff on the other side and we're walking on this ledge that's only about two or three feet wide at and we're kind of walking up the canyon till we can get to where that waterfall was and as we're going there dick who's up front is sees that there's this giant rock on the ledge and so it's it's in our way and it could easily cause one of us to trip or fall so he just just mindlessly go kicks it he says something like get out of my way and kicks that huge rock off the canyon wall and I looked at him and I said dick there's people down there and I waited for what felt like the longest three seconds of my life for that rock to hit bottom and sure enough we hit this we are this you know thud and sploosh and and then people started screaming and this guy started swearing in words in the English language I'd never heard before and all three of us instantly went like this and it was like it was like without you know we just instantly went down and I don't know why we did that except that maybe we just felt the weight of that action and so dick takes off running and I looked at my friend and I said he's got the car keys so we take off running and so we're like hightailing it down this path to get to the back to the canyon and as we get down to the canyon floor there's like EMTs coming in there and they're they're bringing stretchers and we were like what happened back there so we got back to the parking lot and there's like an EMT helicopter flying in overhead and all of us were just like what just happened now if you feel the weight in your stomach like I do every time I rehearse that memory then maybe you understand what Mahaveer is getting at he's saying that when we do good or bad deeds it actually has an effect on our body our immune systems were shot that night we went we got back to their apartment we all of us just had to take a nap because we were so exhausted from all the adrenaline that was racing through her system and and several of us got sick that weekend because we just probably were stressed out from what had happened so that's kind of what mahavira's getting yet and and that story does sort of illustrate that the central religious problem in Jainism is suffering and so Jainism is a religion geared completely on trying to overcome that problem and it makes it a really simple religion to follow but because of it can you imagine a religion that's totally dedicated to ending all suffering for all beings on earth that's Jainism that's it it's I mean I could stop the lecture here and say now you know what Jainism but obviously it's the details that matter right this is how do jeans actually do this so the question is what's the religious solution if if if suffering is the problem and Nirvana is the goal then how do they get to that goal and the answer is they take five great vows genes and you could probably guess what these are right five great vows are first and foremost non-violence the Sanskrit word for that is ahimsa and you may remember that from the previous chapter Jainism borrows a lot of these concepts from Hinduism and kind of ramps them up a lot so Jane's take it to the nth degree in fact if I could describe Jainism in a single phrase it would be this Jainism is like Hinduism on crack right it just takes this idea of ahimsa that Hindus teach don't cause harm to others and they they ramp it up as much as possible so much so that Jane's will not ever go to war they they would never cause unnecessary pain or suffering to any living being animal human or otherwise and they're strict vegetarians almost to the point of being vegan and so they take this principle of ahimsa to the extreme anything that causes harm is creating more of the problem so obviously if the problem is suffering then the solution is stop causing suffering right it's it's as simple as that but there's more to it the second vowel is non lying this means that you're not allowed to tell lies because if you do tell lies it can actually cause harm in society imagine you know people who are very deceptive can trick people and into doing bad things it may even you know lead to bad consequences let's say somebody asks you you know for directions of the nearest hospital and you give them inaccurate information that people those people who might be trying to deliver a baby and they can't get to the hospital on time there could be you know problems with that so you see the issue here right lying is considered to be a form of suffering because it can lead to these types of misfortunes and Janes take that to the nth degree where they say that even exaggeration is considered lying to them in America we're not really used to this because we tolerate exaggeration all the time all right you probably even noticed right I'm exaggerating right now as I say that the Americans exaggerate all the time and yet you're like yeah you're right we do we do we do it so much that we don't even pay attention to when somebody does something like that so if you ever say something like I'm starving right you probably aren't starving you just haven't eaten in four hours there are starving people in the world who are insulted by the fact of you using the phrase I'm starving when you've probably never experienced starvation in your life so what the genes are saying is that creates pain and suffering for others because you're not really telling the truth and you're missing you're misleading people so you know we've all met that person who comes back from a fishing trip and he's like yeah you know I caught a fish it was like there's like this big right guys lie about size all the time and that can lead to miss you know unmet expectations or or other problems so you see the point here is the exaggeration is not good for a society because it creates either hysteria or or just simply a tolerance of misinformation and then we all just get used to it and we look the other way Jane's are saying no they take these vows very seriously and so they know that if an employer were to hire a Jane they know that that Jane isn't going to cause any mischief because they're serious about these five great vows whereas Hindus do tend to be a little bit more laid-back I mean some induce follow with some Hindus don't they believe they've got an infinite series of reincarnations to go through and and so do Jane's but James are dedicated to fulfilling these five great vows the third foul is non-stealing and so therefore you shouldn't take what's not given to you that creates suffering because especially if if you take something that is necessary for that person's well-being like food or money or transportation if you steal someone's car now they can't get to work and now they can't do their job or they have to work twice as hard to make up the money to pay for another car you see how this just makes the world even a worse place to live in so the chains are saying look don't even steal even if no one's looking you're taking something from the cash register you know don't even do that because it just makes things harder on the world the fourth great vow is chastity which means that if you aren't married then you are to remain completely celibate and if you are married then you are to remain completely faithful to that person because if you've ever been the product of a one-night stand you know how that feels right if somebody cheats on you it hurts inside and so you just you've got to be careful that you don't take advantage of people right chastity is is the best way to try to keep your relationships healthy so jeans are just saying that you should try to remain as sexually pure as possible and this is the way they do that the fifth great vow is non-attachment and that means that you're not to form any emotional attachments to any physical things including your family your home your territory your clothes your money your possessions why because those things can create more suffering if you're always worrying about them if you're always worrying about your stocks or your or your house or your car right you know I have friends who watch their car incessantly because they're afraid of any sort of ding or scratch getting on it so they're always waxing it and cleaning it and I'm like you're just wasting a lot of your time because the car is gonna be you know gone in a few years but you get so emotionally attached to something it can actually create a lot of anxiety and suffering inside the person I'm sure many of you have suffered from flooding in the past my wife and I lived in a house where over the past six years there was a lot of flooding in our region and our basement filled up with about three feet of water and we don't have a sump pump and so the water just kept coming in and we were trying to take buckets full out but it it just it just kept coming in and so we had to wait for the rain to stop and and for the water is just a source because we were below the floodplain and so it was just it took weeks for that water to get down and so by the time the water receded all of the stuff in the basement was just sopping wet and it was starting to form black mold on everything and silly us we had cardboard boxes down there and so all of my childhood belongings were all covered in black mold my teddy bears right my my old toys that I used to play with as a kid we even had love letters that my wife and I exchanged when we were first dating that we kept down there and all that stuff was ruined it was gone there's no scraping black mold off of a love letter it's just it's just destroyed so I had to throw all that stuff out and I remember taking boxes of it out to the garage to throw away and I was weeping right because it was hard for me to let go of my childhood I was gonna I was gonna keep those boxes and share that with my kids or you know I wanted to look at those love letters again and and reminisce about the past but now I don't have anything but my memory to hold on to those that past anymore so it was hard for me to let go but that's exactly what the genes are trying to say is that forming these attachments creates suffering in our lives and that can be true for relationships friendships some of you are probably just getting out of high school and you're just now starting to realize that your high school relationships aren't gonna be the same some of you know what I'm talking about well you know once you get to college you're like we're gonna be BFFs forever and then you get to college and you go different ways and you're living in different cities and suddenly you just don't stay in touch and you're like I thought we were gonna be best friends forever but things changed and you you know you start to develop different personalities you know start a family or something and you just lose some of those relationships and that's also true if if you lose someone a friend or a family member when somebody passes away it's hard for us to let go and and what the genes are trying to say is that you've got to be able to let that person go because if you hold on to the pain of their loss then you're gonna find yourself in a world of psychological torment and stress I think most of you guys know what the five stages of grieving our and notice how most of them are negative denial that's not good anger that's not healthy bargaining that's not good and in depression that's not healthy and then acceptance and what the genes are trying to say is that you have to get to that fifth stage so that you can become so you can move on with your life otherwise you're always living in the past and saying man I remember back in 86 you know like uncle Rico I remember when I was dating so-and-so but that person's gone now and you're just holding on to that old relationship when they've moved on and you should too and so if you're always saying wait you know I don't know how I can live without you then you're not really healthy you're not in the present moment you're living in the past and that's going to create a lot of pain and suffering for you so you've got to learn to let go especially in a loving relationship right anyone who says I can't live without you in a loving relationship folks that's not love that's that's slavery they've got their death grip around you're saying if you leave I'll kill myself right okay first of all probably not and second of all that's not good that's not healthy that's that's actually a relationship where you're not really giving the person the freedom to choose you that's why people say right if you love someone you will let them go because if you let go and they stay with you you know that's genuine love but if you let go and they leave that love wasn't meant to be that's not a reciprocal relationship and so what the genes are just trying to indicate is that you've got to move on in life that that things change and there is suffering in life but you're gonna create more suffering if you're forming these attachments so the five great vows or to illustrate the different ways in which we can alleviate suffering in our own lives and like I said Jane's take this to the nth degree now Mahavira also establish what's called the hierarchy of beings even though he eliminated a caste system he's not saying that some beings are higher or lower than others what he's trying to indicate is that these are the different ways in which we can suffer so this isn't a status symbol this is really reflective the amount of suffering that we can sow so notice at the top of that list are the five sensed creatures humans and larger animals all have the five senses seeing smelling tasting touching and hearing and so there's five different ways that you could suffer so there is obviously physical pain right if you if somebody kicks you in the shins that hurts right so I think we all know what physical pain is then there's visual pain when you see something so gross so grotesque you just makes you kind of sick to even look at it that that's a form of suffering then there's tasting suffering right have you ever eaten moldy food by accident and you're like wow I get it out of my mouth you're like scraping your tongue and it's try to get the taste out that creates suffering as well and then there's like auditory suffering like when I do this right that kind of sucked and so that's just a different way of suffering and then there's what am I got left smell right so just a few seconds ago I farted and now I'm breathing those particles in my nostrils and it's actually making me suffer in a whole new way so you know especially with the realization that those particles that are in my nose we're actually once inside my butt and now that I know that that's actually creating a different form of suffering the point is is that the $0.05 creatures can suffer in multiple ways and what you want to do is to try to alleviate as much suffering as is humanly possible now below the the five sense creatures are the four sense creatures and here he says that these creatures are death he puts flies wasps and butterflies into this category because you can imagine Mahavira doing like primitive science if you will like he's wandering around through the forests of India and he's making just some simple observations he notices that when you yell or scream at a fly or a butterfly it doesn't do anything right you can clap your hands at a butterfly and all those keeps fluttering on by you can yell and scream at a fly and it'll just sit there it's not until you move toward it right you can see you but it can't hear you when it when it sees you that's when it flies away so that he begins to think that maybe these creatures are deaf now we know from a scientific point of view that the wasps can hear because that's actually one of the ways that you can attract wasp is sonar but he doesn't know this scientific truth and therefore he's just making some simple observations the third rung of the hierarchy is the three sense creatures and here he says these beings are both deaf and blind and he puts ants fleas and moths into this category because again I think he's just making some simple observations when you watch an ant move around how does it move around it uses its feelers right we even use that phrase because it appears to us as if the ant is using his antennae to feel the ground as if he's blind like a blind person would feeling the surroundings so they can navigate through the world now we know that ants can see there's actually using their antlers to pick up the electromagnetic waves of other ants that have come before their to pick up this scent to make their path back to their anthill but he doesn't know that about the ants so he assumes that they must be blind even though they have eyes they must not be able to use them and fleas have to be blind because I don't even know where they're going right there always is like going bouncing all over the place you know and they don't seem to be traveling anywhere they just keep ending up back where they started or moths I think he's probably seen that moths will fly into the flames so notice that the moth can feel so it might be flying toward the flames and it's like oh it's warm over here oh oh it's warm oh and they just right into the fire right so he assumes probably the reason why moths do that is because they must be blind they can't see where they're going then he gets down to the two sense creatures that only have the abilities for taste and touch and here he puts worms and leeches into that category simply as a way of saying right they all they do is sit around and eat kind of like my brother right they're not really they're just leeches they're just sucking the food out of stuff and and and they can move around that's about it they don't have any other features to them so he assumes that they only have taste in touch and then he gets to the bottom of the hierarchy in which you get to the one sense creatures and these only have the capacity for touch and he puts plants trees flowers all microscopic ordinate organism and then the four elements that were popular during this time period the earth wind fire and water claiming that all of those have the capacity for touch because I guess a plant can feel where's water water is that's why the tap root goes to the water source and water knows you know when it's traveling around a rocket feels the rocket moves around fire knows where the the combustible things are so it travels along we had the wood frame to continue burning so it assumes that these have the $0.01 creature or they are one of the ones as creatures so what do all of these beings have in common with each other they all have the capacity capacity to touch therefore they all have the capacity to feel therefore they all have the capacity to suffer and now you start to see why he thinks that we can be reincarnated as all these things he says that we should alleviate suffering for all beings in the universe not just humans and animals but for trees and even rocks and fire so for that reason James will not put out a fire because they believe that there is a human soul locked inside there as one scholar of religions describes Jainism he says thus the whole world is alive in every stone on the highway a soul is locked so tightly enchained by matter that it cannot escape the careless foot that kicks it I like dick or cry out and pain but it is capable of suffering nevertheless so notice that rocks don't have mouths you can't hear them cry but they feel pain according to the Jain religion when a match is struck a fire being with a soul which maybe one day reborn into a human body is born only to die a few moments afterwards and every drop of rain and every breath of wind and every lump of clay there is a living soul so this is how Janes see the world that everything is alive and therefore everything can suffer and Jains are dedicating to trying to end that suffering for all beings now I can probably assume that many of you are sitting there thinking right this is ridiculous Brian rocks don't feel pain they don't have a central nervous system they can't suffer and I would agree with you I get that right that you know rocks don't feel pain I don't know about plants there's been some speculation recently about that but but before we start judging the genes on what they think do feel pain maybe we need to take a look at our own lives and ask ourselves are we causing pain and suffering to beings that we know feel pain and doing so unnecessarily I just want to think of a minute about the the food production system in America because folks we've been doing food differently than than all of human history starting around the 1960s we started practicing something called factory farming where we isolate all of these animals into a very tight confined space where they are pretty much tortured their entire lives and they have very short lives and so they're just there's locked inside these cages there they're oftentimes not even allowed to see sunshine you know you don't see that many free-range farms anymore why because in America we eat four times as much me than we need to we more protein than the body can even process so that means that most of the protein that we eat is just going out in our feces and so we're not even absorbing at all for all the meat that we eat we don't even need that much but we eat four times as much meat as we ought to and and therefore it necessitates this habit of raising and creating animals inside these factory farms just so that we can raise them for the slaughter there are 60 billion land animals who are created raised and slaughtered every year in the world 60 billion land animals that's just the land animals there's another 90 billion sea creatures that are also bred for this purpose and the question is why or that's ten times the population of Earth with just the land animals alone so that means that each of us are eating about six or seven different animals every year that the complete animal you know every part and and we maximize that by grinding them up I could show you pictures of this but I've done that in some of my classes and if that students get physically nauseous and had to leave it raises the question right if I can't even show pictures about how we produce our food then why are we doing it doesn't that indicate a problem in other words maybe we should be rethinking how we treat animals because animals can suffer so before we start judging the genes on their weird belief that rocks can feel pain maybe we need to think twice about how we treat beings that clearly can suffer in our own world so I just want to give that as food for thought because this is the reason why Jane's are vegetarian now Jane's have the ability or have the option of choosing two different paths if that they can follow and the first path all genes have to follow and that's a path of vegetarianism they are required not to eat meat because this creates pain and suffering unnecessarily sure if the vegetables can suffer a little bit but notice that they're only on the $0.01 level creatures they can only suffer through touch but animals can suffer in five different ways and therefore you get five times as much bad karma for eating an animal than you would eating a vegetable so they're trying to reduce the amount of karma as much as possible they also practice monogamy for the same reason again if you're strictly having you know one partner then you're gonna be faithful to that partner throughout your life if you've ever been cheated on you know how much that hurts and so they're just trying to avoid unnecessary forms of emotional suffering and then they limit the number of acquisitions that they collect over time so all of your possessions right you know if you go into anyone's closet they're probably gonna have like 40 different outfits some of which they never wear and the genes are saying why don't you limit that to just a few outfits that you can wear over and over again at least that way you're not harming the the or the plants that are necessary to make that clothing item so they limit their possessions because they realize that everything that you make whether it's a house or a piece of furniture even cars or computers require that something has to die in order for that thing to be made and then think about all the pollution and the stuff that affects the environment from the manufacturing process of those acquisitions so they try to minimize their possessions as much as it's possible to reduce the pain and suffering in the world they also fast on a regular basis so that again they can reduce the amount of pain and suffering from eating Mahavira fasted for 40 days without food or water and yet he survived survived right that's a quite a feat and many Janes are trying to mimic him in that and that it's sort of a contest if you will to see how long can you go without food so that you are not causing any more bad karma in the world so they fast usually like two days a week some sometimes they'll fast for a couple of weeks and their holidays are to commemorate mahira by fasting on all the holidays they practice meditation to help them to alleviate mental stress strife and anxiety so again as we talked about in Hinduism meditation is a way of trying to calm the nerves and relax the mind so that you don't feel ok it's kind of anxiety it helps you to kind of recenter yourself and then you feel better about yourself they also sweep the ground before they walk and if you've ever seen one of those documentaries about India you might notice that there's people wearing white robes carrying these broomsticks with peacock feathers on it they just collect these peacock feathers that lie on the floor but put them together and then they use that to sweep the ground so that wherever they step they're not accidentally stepping on something that could suffer like an insect or even an animal right India's you've got a lot of creatures in it so they're sweeping the ground to try to minimize the damage that they caused as they walk down the streets they also wear face masks to protect anything from going into their mouth unnecessarily especially at nighttime where you can't always see what's going into your mouth or not there are a lot of bugs out in the air remember Mahavira lived in a time before there were even windows so you know there's bugs inside the houses outside the house and therefore it's very likely that we ingest a lot of insects on a regular basis if you're outdoors camping or even just spending time out in your yard so therefore they were these face masks to try to minimize that as much as it's possible now of course today they would use the windows as the protector so there's not that many bugs inside a house or a you know a school building or something like that so therefore they won't wear the masks all in America as much but when necessary they try to do that and they strain their water for the same reasons if you go out and collect water at the local stream you're probably going to find that there's some living objects on there there could be some fish or something so they want to strain their water to make sure that they're not unnecessarily killing life-forms and then drinking that unnecessarily creating bad karma for themselves by doing that so they strain the water so they can put those living beings back into the stream and then just drink the water clean they also don't eat root vegetables for the simple reason that it actually requires you to break off the roots in order to get to the vegetable so that's actually harming the vegetable twice so you know if you could just like pull an apple off of a tree or you know pull something directly out of the ground and start eating it that's better than having to like for example take a potato pull it out of the ground break it off and then you know break all the roots off but this is just unnecessary pain so they try to again ramp things up and take it to the ends agree all genes are required to follow that path but for those who are going to seek enlightenment monks and nuns they have another set of rules to follow so keep in mind right there's a lot of rules that Jane's have to follow and then in addition to those rules these monks and nuns also have to do the following they're not allowed to have family so they have to leave their family behind and pursue nirvana on their own so they don't have any attachments to people in this world and they are to remain completely celibate because again sex can be a form of attachment and it can create a kind of suffering internally if you're always like wanting sex well we'll talk more about that in the next chapter they go barefoot because again you have to kill something to make shoes whether it's an animal or a tree anything you make a shoe it's gonna require something to die so they just go barefoot plus that makes them more sensitive to what they're stepping on and it prevents them from accidentally stepping on something that could feel pain and it beg for food everywhere they go does this sound familiar I mean are you starting to is this sort of ringing a bell from previous chapter we covered this should sound a lot like the sannyasins and you may remember we talked about that in the previous chapter I told you to remember that word in Sanskrit because here it is again you're seeing the Jain path taking something very similar to a new ism but kind of ramping it up right there taking the sannyasi path in order to eliminate all of the suffering in the world it's not necessarily true with the hindu followers but in Jainism that's the sole purpose of these people these monks are trying to end suffering as much as is humanly possible so they they beg for food again so that it can continue on their journey and that way they're not responsible for whatever bad karma was caused by the killing of those vegetables or food that was given to them so they just suffer the bad karma from eating it not from having dug it out of the ground or you know slaughter an animal or something like that they also try to endure insults as a sign of religious piety Mahavira was severely mocked I think you can kind of imagine that right because many of the Hindus thought this is going too far and so therefore he suffered a lot of insults so genes tolerate that as a sign of like good virtue I guess if if you don't if somebody insults you and you don't retaliate well it proves your moral character that you're you're not going to resort to their kind of childlike behaviors so you just suffer that those insults and that gives you a good karma if you don't respond in kind then you've proven yourself as being a good person but ultimately speaking that James realized that even your mere existence is creating suffering in the world after all you still have to eat and therefore you're going to continue to cause suffering no matter you know how long you live so the ultimate solution in Jainism is self starvation the idea behind this is that when a Jain is ready to leave the world they stopped eating they eat their last meal with the thought that okay I'm gonna have to suffer the karmic effects of having had that food so the next day I won't cause any more bad karma and then I can kind of work off the bad karma from the day before because remember karma always comes back to bite you so they work off the bad karma from the next day and then the next day they go without eating again and they're working off some more of that bad karma without creating any more bad karma and so they're there there's spiritual karmic pool if you will it's getting lower and lower since they're not having to suffer any more bad karma and in the meantime right they're suffering these hunger pains which they see as the outworking of bad karma in their own lives so they they think they feel like they are simply paying the punishment for having eaten all of that food throughout their life and then the next day they go without food again and then the next day after that still working off that bad karma until eventually the bad karma is all worked out of their system and if they can exist in that purified state with no bad karma they become sort of like righteous people if they die in that perfected state they go straight to nirvana and that's what Jane's are trying to do is to reach that point of nirvana where they are free from suffering now you might be asking right is it self starvation itself a form of suffering and the answer is yes and no no in the sense that they didn't cause this so you may remember in Hinduism we talked about this that when you do an action that's what creates the bad karma karma means action so therefore you have to do something that causes the bad reverberations into the universe self starvation is a way of simply not doing something not eating and eating creates bad karma so what they believe is that the suffering that you experience from self starvation is actually the residual bad karma from the life that you had prior to when you were eating so it's not you causing the bad karma it's actually nature just simply getting its revenge for all that bad karma you brought into it so that's one response they have another response would be this if you guys know anything about moral theories James are utilitarians in their morality that is to say they are trying to maximise on pleasure and minimize on pain so if you had a choice between two options both of which create bad consequences suffering then choose the one with the least suffering that's what utilitarianism says always do that action which that that produces the best outcome in terms of happiness and and and the least amount of pain so jeans are utilitarian in that sense and that they're just trying to minimize that the amount of pain as much as this humanly possible and furthermore and this is just a weird factoid for you that when people actually do starve to death at the last minute right before they die your body starts releasing endorphins into your system that actually makes you feel really good so in that last moment you actually don't feel the pain of the starvation that the hunger pains do eventually go away and your body starts releasing the these chemicals in your body that help you to tolerate the pain because your systems are shutting down and so it's like your body's way of saying okay right you're gonna you're gonna make it through this and and then you die and what the genes are saying is that that that experience of sudden euphoria right before you die is that nirvanic state so technically then you're not suffering anymore and if you die in that state they believe you go straight into nirvana so that's really what the goal is for this religion now they also contribute something that has been very influential in America and that's their view of epistemology epistemology is simply the study of knowledge so it's the question how do we know what we know there's a whole field and philosophy that's dedicated to that kind of question genes have a very unique view on epistemology so it's worth noting it raises the question right how do you know what is true or false about religion and the word that captures their epistemology is an akan Tuan - Sanskrit word that means non absolute so what they're saying by that is that there are no absolutes nothing is like 100% true or 100% false yeah there is no such thing as like a 100% good being in a 1% evil being the truth lies somewhere in the middle that truth has many facets to it so therefore you might be making a blanket statement about a person or even a group of people that without you by ignoring all of the nuances right so you say a whole group of people are bad when there are good people in there too or a whole you know you say that a person is good but that person has some bad qualities too so what the jeans are trying to get us to recognize is that truth is usually a lot more complicated than just black or white it's not just you know this or that there's oftentimes this sort of like gray area if you will then we have to kind of recognize and and that's what their life is right that we should avoid judgmentalism and remain open-minded because when somebody is trying to tell you something maybe part of what they're saying is true but part of it is false and once you speak into recognize that you can kind of pick out the parts that are true and and maybe pick out the parts that are false and then kind of navigate between that but our language is very messy a lot of words are very vague or ambiguous and therefore when we make these statements like that movie sucked right we're ignoring some of the good aspects of that movie so I'm a Star Wars fan I'm gonna use Star Wars references occasionally the Star Wars prequels right everybody hated those but they had some good points in them and that's the the part that we need to just realize that there was the really good special effects there are some cool characters in the prequels like you know qui-gon jinn or Darth Maul of course they killed off those two characters in the first movie but the point is that you know you've got to see the good parts in life as well as the bad parts that if you just look at a person and think that person is evil you're missing the deaf person has some good qualities and even Hitler had some good qualities and I'm not I'm not trying to defend Hitler so back off okay I'm just saying that he wasn't born evil it's not like he came out of his mother's womb going I'm gonna kill me some Jews right sure that's how he spoke back then there that Hitler was probably a good child at some point who made some poor choices had led to the devastation of all of those Jews in World War two that you know he does have bad qualities and we shouldn't ignore those either so therefore we have to just sort of recognize that everybody walks around with good or bad qualities that none of the people you meet are 100% good and and none of them are loved one percent evil that usually the truth lies somewhere in between that and they just want to acknowledge that they capture that with a story about five blind men and an elephant and you may have heard this and other religions or even just in other disciplines it's a popular story but when I did research on it I came to find out that I think the genes were the first people that we have record of who first told the story so I think I'm just going to attribute to them and it fits their theology pretty keenly so let's talk about the allegory so a king sends these five blind men into a room with an elephant in order to describe what the elephant looks like of course they're blind guys so they can't see the elephant so they have to use their hands to reach out and to touch the elephant and then describe what they feel and so one of them grabs the trunk of the elephant and says I think the elephant is kind of long and cylindrical it's very malleable and it's kind of wet it's like a snake and another one grabs the ear of the elephant and says no it's not round it's actually very flat it is malleable but it's very thin and dry it's like a winnowing fan another one grabs the leg of the elephant says it's actually very big and it's rough it's not smooth and it's not wet it's like a tree and another one grabs the side of the elephant says no it's flat and it's smooth and it's huge it's like a wall and then another one grabs the tail of the elephant and says no it's actually cylindrical it's very thin and it's very hairy it's it's like a rope now each one of these blind guys is describing part of the elephant but none of them have the whole elephant and what the genes are trying to say that each one of us are in that predicament we are like those five blind men in the sense that we don't have access to the whole truth therefore the things that we believe may be partially right and partially false there are some things that we we carry with us like superstitions or false beliefs that we just develop maybe because someone spread a rumor and we just we bought it we were gullible in that way so you have to realize that you you are not omniscient and that other people know stuff too and so you've just got to take that into consideration so when the Jains are saying you shouldn't be judgmental this is kind of what they're getting yet is you have to recognize that other people know stuff that you don't and you can learn from them and likewise right you can say something as well but some of the things that you say may not be completely accurate and so you might get part of it wrong jeans are saying you just have to recognize that truth has many different facets and then if you combine all of those perspectives together by hearing other people's points of view you can piece that together and get the full elephant right that's kind of how we should approach religions then maybe different religions have different ways of trying to understand God or to understand religion and so each religion contributes a piece of the puzzle right we're each just seeing things from a certain point of view we don't see the rest of the picture at least not all at once but as we pick up other people's perspectives we start to see more of the whole truth and then we can make a much more informed worldview regarding all of those different perspectives so this has been hugely influential in the postmodern movement in America when we when Europeans and Americans discovered Jainism in India they took it back to America and started talking about it and it led to the postmodern movement it's now so popular in the West now the last thing I do want to point out about the Jain theology is their view of God because notice I haven't even mentioned God up until now what I just mentioned it in that story about the blind men jain's actually rejected the belief in a creator god and they also offer all sorts of reasons for that in their scriptures and if you think I'm making this up this comes from there's scriptures the Mahabharata written about the ninth century where it says foolish men declare that creator made the world the doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised and should be rejected and so they offer all sorts of reasons about well you know why would there have to be a creator of the universe can't the universe just be eternal and if you say well then where did the universe come from they just turn it back around say well where did God come from so you know they asked questions like if God really created the world why why would he allow so much suffering wouldn't good God want to create a world full of love and peace and prosperity so therefore they just believe the universe has just always been here and that all of the suffering of the world is the product of people in ignorance not enlightened causing the pain and suffering in the world now there are two branches of Jainism that you should know about the Digambar --is are the ones that go around naked like Mahavira did so they're trying to imitate their founder by mimicking him by wearing the sky as their clothes Skyclad monks is what those weren't Digambar amines and so they wander through India naked like the sannyasi is do in Hinduism so they kind of blend in with some of the scenery in India therefore women cannot become monks in that branch simply because they'd have to be naked and that's shameful in Indian culture so they just say no no no no that that's not appropriate and therefore they don't allow women to become monks in that branch but the other branch is a little bit more progressive in the sense that the spate Tabares do wear white robes whites the symbol for purity so they sort of reason that hey you know as long as you're wearing white it sort of symbolizes that you're trying to be a good person and that's that's what their goal is therefore women can become monks because they can wear white robes and there's no problem there and that's really the only distinction between these two branches of Jainism whether or not women can be monks and whether or not they have to wear robes so I'll end with the symbol for Jainism it is the outstretched palm that represents non-violence and oftentimes put symbol inside a much larger view of the universe where they describe the abode of the liberated soul that the place of Nirvana the three parts of the path to liberation the correct faith correct conduct and correct knowledge and then you might notice again that swastika symbol which is taken from Hinduism and used in Jainism to describe the four different states of the world that we live in the heavenly realm the human realm the animal realm and the hell realm right so you know if you do bad deeds and you're gonna end up in this bottom rung of existence and then they kind of close all that up with this symbol at the bottom that just says the mutual assistance of all beings we should want to help all beings and suffering and that's what Jainism is all about to put an end to suffering so remember this suffering is the problem Nirvana is their goal and the solution is the five great vows particularly self starvation the ultimate goal and that's Jainism in a nutshell we're going to start Buddhism in the next chapter so you're ready to take the next quiz on Jainism and then you'll get ready for Chapter five I'll see you then