Ahiṃsā

In plain terms

Ahiṃsā is usually translated as non-violence, which makes it sound like a policy about what not to do. In the traditions that take it seriously it is closer to a discipline about what kind of person to become.

It covers three levels. Not doing harm. Not causing it to be done. Not consenting to it being done - which reaches into what you buy, what you eat, what you approve of, and what you allow to be done on your behalf.

And it applies to thought and speech, not only to action. An injury intended and not carried out has already broken it. That is what makes the Jain version so demanding: it is not a rule about violence but a claim that harm is what binds a person, and that reducing it is the whole of the practical task.

As a philosopher would put it

In Jainism ahiṃsā is the first of the five vows and the ground of the rest; it is applied with a graded seriousness according to the number of senses a being possesses, and monastic practice extends to sweeping the path, filtering water and restricting movement in the rainy season. The metaphysical basis is that injury accrues karmic matter to the soul, so harm is not merely wrong but binding.

Buddhist and Hindu treatments are less absolute. The first precept is undertaken voluntarily rather than imposed, and intention is central - Buddhist ethics assesses the act by the volition behind it, which permits distinctions Jainism does not draw.

The Mahābhārata and the Gītā set ahiṃsā against kṣatriyadharma, the warrior's duty, and the conflict is not resolved in favour of either. Gandhi's twentieth-century reworking makes ahiṃsā an active political method rather than abstention - a force, joined to satyagraha, holding to truth - which is a substantial development and not simply a recovery.

What is actually disputed

Whether non-injury can be a complete ethics.

The hard case is defence. If harm is always wrong, then failing to prevent a greater harm by a lesser one is required, and the person who does nothing while an atrocity proceeds has kept the principle. Gandhi accepted versions of this conclusion and was pressed hard on it, including over what should have been done about the persecution of Jews in Europe.

The Jain answer is consistent and demanding: the vow binds regardless, and a life that cannot be lived without harm is to be reduced in scope until it can. The householder is held to a lesser version precisely because the full one is incompatible with ordinary life.

A separate difficulty is that no life avoids harm. Breathing, walking and farming kill, which Jain practice acknowledges by grading rather than by exemption - and which makes the principle a direction of travel rather than a standard anyone meets.