Jaina Philosophy

A Jain monk sweeps the ground before he sits so as not to crush an ant. A Jain logician, centuries ago, insisted that every statement about a pot must carry the little word syāt, “in some respect.” The two gestures belong together. Both come from a philosophy convinced that reality is full of living beings and full of aspects, and that harming either — the creature or the many-sided truth — binds the soul. Jainism is a living religion of some millions of people, in India and across the world, including Malaysia. Its philosophy is one of the great Indian systems in its own right, not a footnote to any other.

Jaina view This page presents Jaina thought as its own teachers present it, drawing on Jaina sources; rival schools’ objections are gathered in the box further down. For the shorter overview and the classic self-debate, see In Dialogue.

Mahāvīra and the ford-makers

Jain tradition holds that in each great half-cycle of cosmic time twenty-four Tīrthaṅkaras, “ford-makers,” appear: human beings who conquer passion, attain omniscience and found a “ford” — a community of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen — across the river of rebirth. The first of our age was Ṛṣabha (Ādinātha), the twenty-second Neminātha, remembered as a cousin of Krishna, and the twenty-third Pārśva. The twenty-fourth was Vardhamāna Mahāvīra, the “great hero.” He did not invent the faith, Jains say; he restated an eternal teaching. Each Tīrthaṅkara is a jina, “victor” — over passion, not over others — and the name Jaina means “follower of the victors.”

Born a prince near Vaiśālī in Bihar, Mahāvīra renounced the world at thirty, spent some twelve years in fierce austerity and silence, attained kevala-jñāna, omniscience, and taught for thirty years before his death at Pāvā. Jain tradition dates him 599–527 BCE; many historians place him somewhat later, as an elder contemporary of the Buddha in the 5th century BCE. Most historians accept Pārśva as a historical figure too, which makes the movement older than Mahāvīra.

1. c. 8th–7th c. BCE?PārśvaThe twenty-third Tīrthaṅkara; his followers kept a fourfold restraint that Mahāvīra expanded to five vows. His date is uncertain.
2. c. 5th c. BCEMahāvīraTeaching in the Ganges plain, in Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit, not Sanskrit.
3. c. 2nd–5th c. CEUmāsvāti’s Tattvārtha SūtraThe first systematic summary in Sanskrit sūtras, accepted by all Jains. Its date is disputed.
4. 5th c. CEThe Valabhī councilThe Śvetāmbara canon of Āgamas is written down in Gujarat.
5. c. 8th c.HaribhadraDoxographer, yogic theorist and generous critic of every school.
6. 1089–1172HemacandraPolymath at the court of the Chaulukya kings of Gujarat.

Soul and non-soul: the seven tattvas

The Tattvārtha Sūtra opens with the path itself, the famous “three jewels” (ratnatraya):

Right faith means conviction in the real principles, the tattvas, which a few sūtras later are listed. Read them as a story in seven words:

There is the jīva, the soul, whose defining mark is consciousness; there is ajīva, what is not soul; karmic matter flows in (āsrava) and binds; the inflow can be stopped (saṃvara) and old karma shed (nirjarā); and then the soul is free. The Jain teachers’ own image is a boat on a lake: water leaks in through holes (inflow) and the boat sinks lower (bondage); plug the holes (stopping), bail out the water (shedding), and the boat rises and floats free. Many texts add merit and demerit, for a list of nine (nava-tattva / nava-padārtha).

The non-soul is not just matter. Jainism counts six real substances (dravya): souls; matter (pudgala), made of atoms; space; time; and two unusual ones, dharma and adharma — not virtue and vice here, but the media of motion and of rest, like water that lets a fish swim and shade that lets a traveller stop. Souls are infinite in number and fill the world: not only humans and animals but plants, and beings with only the sense of touch whose bodies are earth, water, fire and air. A soul is not fixed in size; like a lamp’s light filling a small room or a large hall, it fills whatever body it occupies.

Every real thing, the Jains add, both endures and changes. Gold persists while the bracelet is melted into a necklace:

This one line places Jainism between its neighbours: against Advaita, real change; against the Buddhists, real endurance.

Karma you could weigh

For most schools karma is a moral law or a latent impression. For Jainism it is stuff: extremely fine particles of matter that fill the world. Activity of body, speech and mind (which the Tattvārtha Sūtra’s sixth chapter calls yoga) draws them in; the passions (kaṣāyas) — anger, pride, deceit and greed — make them stick, as dust sticks to an oiled body. Bound karma clouds the soul’s innate infinite knowledge, perception, bliss and energy. There are eight main kinds: four “destructive” ones that obscure knowledge, perception and energy and produce delusion, and four that shape a life’s body, length, status and feelings.

The passions even colour the soul. Jain texts describe six leśyās, soul-colours from black to white, with a parable: six travellers, hungry, come to a fruit tree. The first wants to uproot it, the second to cut the trunk, the third a branch, the fourth a twig, the fifth to pick only the fruit, and the sixth to gather fruit already fallen. Same hunger, six degrees of harm — and six degrees of bondage. See Karma for how Hindu schools differ.

Many-sidedness: anekānta and syādvāda

Reality is anekānta, “not one-sided.” A thing has infinite aspects, and any statement grasps only some. The Jains call each partial view a naya, a standpoint. Seen as substance, the soul is eternal; seen as modes, it changes every moment. Kundakunda distinguished the “absolute” standpoint (niścaya), which sees the pure soul, from the “conventional” (vyavahāra), which describes bound, embodied life. A standpoint becomes false only when it claims to be the whole truth.

The logicians turned this into a formal method, syādvāda, and its saptabhaṅgī, the “seven-fold predication.” Take a clay pot. Tap each of the seven statements to see what it means:

• 1स्याद् अस्तिIn some respect, it isThe pot exists as itself: as clay, here, now.
• 2स्यान् नास्तिIn some respect, it is notThe pot does not exist as cloth, elsewhere, or last year. A thing is defined by what it is not, too.
• 3अस्ति नास्तिIt is, and it is notBoth, taken one after the other from the two respects.
• 4अवक्तव्यIt is inexpressibleBoth at once, in a single word? Language cannot say it — the limit of speech is itself a truth.
• 5अस्ति अवक्तव्यIt is, and is inexpressibleStatement 1 joined with statement 4.
• 6नास्ति अवक्तव्यIt is not, and is inexpressibleStatement 2 joined with statement 4.
• 7त्रिभङ्गIt is, is not, and is inexpressibleAll three basic predicates together. Seven is the complete set of combinations of “is,” “is not” and “inexpressible.”

This is not vagueness. Each statement is definite once its respect is stated, and the logic forbids exactly one thing: an unqualified claim. Haribhadra put the spirit of it in one verse:

How do we know? Five kinds of knowledge

The Jain theory of knowledge starts from the soul, not the senses. Knowledge is of five kinds: sensory and mental cognition (mati), knowledge from scripture and words (śruta), clairvoyance (avadhi), knowledge of others’ minds (manaḥparyaya), and omniscience (kevala). In a striking reversal, the Tattvārtha Sūtra calls the first two indirect, since they depend on senses and mind, and only the last three, known by the soul itself, direct. Later logicians, in dialogue with Nyāya and the Buddhists, allowed ordinary perception to count as “direct in the everyday sense,” and Hemacandra’s Pramāṇamīmāṃsā lists memory, recognition, reasoning, inference and testimony under indirect knowledge. Compare the Hindu lists in How We Know.

Ahiṃsā and the vows

Everything in Jain ethics follows from the crowded, living world. The oldest canonical text, the Prakrit Ācārāṅga, says it plainly:

Monks and nuns take five great vows (mahāvratas) for life: non-harming (ahiṃsā), truthfulness, not stealing, celibacy and non-possession. Lay Jains keep them in a lighter form as “small vows” (aṇuvratas), with supplementary disciplines — which is why Jain diet avoids not only meat but often root vegetables, whose harvest destroys many tiny lives, and why many Jains eat before sunset. Violence, the Tattvārtha Sūtra says, is taking life through careless activity: intention and vigilance matter, not only outcomes. The same five vows appear as the yamas of Patañjali’s Yoga — see Yamas & Niyamas.

At the end of life, a Jain may undertake sallekhanā, a gradual, supervised fast unto death when the body can no longer support the vows. Jains distinguish it sharply from suicide, which is driven by passion; in 2015 the Rajasthan High Court ruled it a crime, and the Supreme Court of India stayed that ruling within weeks.

Fourteen steps to freedom

Liberation is climbed, and Jain texts map the climb as fourteen guṇasthānas, “stations of quality,” defined by how much delusion and passion remain:

1. 1–3Wrong view; a brief “taste” of right view while falling from it; and a mixed state of truth and error.
2. 4Right view without vows: the decisive turn, when one sees reality aright for the first time.
3. 5Partial restraint — the lay person keeping the small vows.
4. 6–7Full restraint of the mendicant, first with lapses of carelessness, then without.
5. 8–10Meditative ascent: unprecedented purity, then only the subtlest greed remaining.
6. 11–12Delusion suppressed (from which one can still fall back), or delusion destroyed for good.
7. 13Omniscience while still embodied and active: the state of a Tīrthaṅkara teaching.
8. 14Omniscience with all activity stopped, moments before death and final release.

The freed soul, now a siddha, rises like a gourd whose clay coating has dissolved, to the summit of the universe, where it remains forever in infinite knowledge and bliss — individual still, not merged into anything. There is no creator God: the world is beginningless. Jains worship the Jinas as perfect exemplars who cannot answer prayers, though Lived practice guardian goddesses such as Padmāvatī and Ambikā do receive petitions in many temples.

Two great traditions

Jains divided early into two main traditions, which agree on the core philosophy and differ on practice:

Among the great teachers: Umāsvāti, whose Tattvārtha Sūtra both traditions claim; Kundakunda, the Digambara mystic of the pure soul; Siddhasena Divākara and Samantabhadra, early logicians; Haribhadra, whose Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya surveys six systems with rare fairness; and Hemacandra, grammarian, poet, logician and author of the Yogaśāstra. Like Hindu societies, Jain communities came to be organised by birth-groups, and the 9th-century Digambara Ādipurāṇa of Jinasena gave varṇa a Jain account, though Jain teachers had long denied that birth makes anyone holy.

Jainism in Tamil history

Jainism shaped Tamil culture deeply. Among the earliest Tamil writings are short inscriptions in Tamil-Brāhmī script, from about the 2nd century BCE onward, cut above stone beds in caves on the granite hills around Madurai — Mangulam, Arittapatti, Kīḻakuyilkudi (Samaṇar Malai) and others — many recording gifts to Jain monks. Centuries later, Jain sculptors carved Tīrthaṅkara reliefs on the same rocks, still visible today.

Jain monks wrote some of Tamil’s great literature: the ethical quatrains of the Nālaṭiyār, paired by an old proverb with the Tirukkuṟaḷ (“the four and the two” lines); the epic Cīvaka Cintāmaṇi of Tiruttakkatēvar (c. 10th century), whose prince wins eight brides and a kingdom and then renounces it all; the polemical Nīlakēci, in which a woman philosopher out-argues the rival schools; and the grammar Naṉṉūl of Pavaṇanti. In the Cilappatikāram, the wise Jain nun Kavunti Aṭikaḷ guides the heroine on her journey to Madurai. See Tamil Sacred Literature.

The relationship also knew conflict. The Shaiva saint Appar was a Jain monk before returning to Shaivism, and the best-known story is that of the child-saint Sambandar at Madurai, told in Sekkiḻār’s 12th-century Periya Purāṇam. Hagiography Queen Maṅkaiyarkkaraci and the minister Kulaccirai, secret Shaivas, invite Sambandar to Madurai. The Jains set fire to his lodging; the Pāṇṭiya king falls ill with fever, and only Sambandar’s sacred ash cures him. In contests of fire and water, his palm-leaf hymn survives the flames and floats upstream on the Vaigai, while the Jains’ leaves burn and drift away. The king becomes a Shaiva — and the text says the defeated Jain monks, eight thousand of them, were impaled, as they had wagered.

Historians treat this as hagiography, not record. They agree that the 7th century saw fierce rivalry for royal patronage, and that Shaivism and Vaishnavism gained ground at the Jains’ expense. But the impalement is known only from texts written centuries later, and there is no independent evidence that it happened, or on that scale; Jain communities continued in Tamil Nadu, and still do. Many scholars read the episode as sectarian triumphalism. It is fair to say plainly that the story celebrates violence, that it should not be told without saying so, that many Shaivas today are uncomfortable with it, and that it remains a painful memory for Tamil Jains. Community today A small Tamil Jain community survives in northern Tamil Nadu, around Tiruvannamalai and Villupuram, with a monastic seat at Melsittamur. In Malaysia a small Jain community, mostly of Gujarati descent, maintains temples including one in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur (see Malaysia & the Diaspora).

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Sources & further reading

• Nathmal Tatia (trans.), That Which Is: Tattvārtha Sūtra (HarperCollins, 1994).
• Padmanabh S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (University of California Press, 1979).
• Paul Dundas, The Jains, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002).
• Jeffery D. Long, Jainism: An Introduction (I. B. Tauris, 2009).
• Bimal Krishna Matilal, The Central Philosophy of Jainism (Anekānta-vāda) (L. D. Institute of Indology, 1981).
• Hermann Jacobi (trans.), Jaina Sūtras, Sacred Books of the East 22 and 45 (1884, 1895).
• Iravatham Mahadevan, Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. (Cre-A and Harvard University, 2003).