(insect, vegetable, or animal) that has even one sense, but the laity are only forbidden to take any life possessed of two or more senses. The Jaina make a very interesting distinction between spiritual and actual murder (Bhāva hiṁsā and Dravya hiṁsā). One sins against Bhāva ahiṁsā by wishing for any one’s death or desiring harm to befall them. Not only so, but if one does not continue and complete one’s own education, or strive to improve one’s own mind, or if one fails to exercise and discipline one’s own soul, one commits Bhāva hiṁsā, for one kills by stultification what one might have been.[1] Dravya ahiṁsā (or the forbidding of material killing) is absolutely binding on all Jaina of every sect, and to offend against this is the greatest of all sins. Breaches of the seventh commandment are considered as breaking this law,[2] because more than one jīva are thereby held to be destroyed.
As a man kills a jīva, so will he be killed in hell, and lurid pictures are published to illustrate this tenet; but if any one kills a monk, that monk in the next world is given the privilege of killing his murderer without sinning against Ahiṁsā.
The Jaina say (with how much truth is doubtful) that their ancient rivals the Buddhists were once as careful as they to observe the rule against killing, but when Buddhism spread to different lands, it had to be adapted to the habits of people who declined to give up slaughter. A Jaina friend of the writer once acted most dramatically the way in which he declared Buddhists in Burma who desire to eat fish lift them carefully out of the water, and, having left them on the bank to die, say: ‘Lo, here is a poor thing that has died! No sin will accrue to us if we eat it.’ They also assert that the Buddhists in Tibet, calculating that sin
