Mahavira and Jainism
A tradition built on the refusal to harm any living thing at all.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 72 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Jainism holds that every living being has a soul and that violence toward any of them binds karma to the self, so its ethics are organised around ahimsa taken to its logical end — filtering water, sweeping the path, and for ascetics, extreme restraint in movement and diet. Mahavira, traditionally 599 to 527 BCE though modern scholarship often places him a century later, is the twenty-fourth and last of its teachers, not its founder. Its doctrine of anekantavada holds that reality has many aspects and no single view captures it.