IB World Religions 4.6.3. Ahimsa and the Ethics of Life and War: Diet, Medical Issues and Dharma Yuddha Notes

4.6.3. Ahimsa and the Ethics of Life and War: Diet, Medical Issues and Dharma Yuddha

Ahimsa in the sources

1. Ahimsa is formed from the word for injury with a negative prefix, so it means not harming rather than being kind. Hindu texts extend it to thought and speech as well as action.
2. Its scriptural base is old and scattered. The Chandogya Upanishad lists ahimsa among the virtues that count as offerings, and the Mahabharata repeats the line that ahimsa is the highest dharma.
3. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras place it first among the yamas, the restraints every practitioner must keep, and the text says the other restraints depend on it.
4. Its scope follows from Hindu cosmology. If the atman in an animal is of the same kind as the atman in a person, harming animals is not a lesser category of act, which is the reasoning behind Hindu concern for sentient creatures.
5. The tradition is not uniform on the point. Vedic ritual included animal sacrifice, and animal offerings continue at some Shakta temples in eastern India and Nepal, where devotees hold that the goddess receives the life rather than that a life is destroyed.
6. The strong ahimsa strand was reinforced from outside. Jain and Buddhist insistence on non-injury pressed Hindu communities from early on, and much later Gandhi made ahimsa a political method rather than only a personal restraint.

Diet, fasting and the cow

1. Vegetarianism is a marker of Hindu practice rather than a rule binding all Hindus. Survey research puts around four in ten Indian adults in the vegetarian category, with wide variation by region, community and caste.
2. The reasoning is partly about food itself. The Bhagavad Gita sorts food by the three gunas, so sattvic food is held to produce clarity, rajasic food agitation and tamasic food dullness, and meat is classed with the last of these.
3. Some communities go further than avoiding meat. Many Vaishnava and ascetic households avoid onion and garlic as stimulants, and food cooked for a deity as prasad follows stricter rules still.
4. Fasting is the other side of the same discipline. Ekadashi, the eleventh day of each lunar fortnight, Shivaratri and the nine nights of Navaratri are widely kept, and fasting is understood as training the senses rather than as penance for wrongdoing.
5. The cow is a special case with legal consequences. Most Hindus regard the cow as gau mata and refuse beef even when they eat other meat, and the Indian Constitution directs states to prohibit the slaughter of cows, which many but not all states do.
6. Cow protection has produced serious violence. Vigilante groups have killed Muslim and Dalit men accused of transporting cattle, at Dadri in 2015 and Alwar in 2017, and Hindu religious leaders and senior politicians have publicly condemned such attacks.

Protection of the weak

1. Ahimsa is stated negatively, but Hindu ethics pairs it with positive duties. Daya (compassion) and dana (giving) are listed among the general virtues, so refraining from harm is only the floor.
2. The householder's obligations make this concrete. Feeding a guest before eating, annadana at temples, and setting out food for animals are daily duties rather than occasional charity.
3. Care of animals is institutionalised. Gaushalas, shelters for old and unproductive cattle, are run by temples and trusts across India, and are funded on the reasoning that a cow may not be killed once she stops producing.
4. Indian law now carries much of this argument. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960 sets general standards, and particular practices are argued in court in secular and religious terms at once.
5. The jallikattu dispute shows the pattern. The Supreme Court banned the Tamil bull-taming event on welfare grounds in 2014, protests followed on the ground that it is a religious and cultural practice, the state legislated to permit it, and the Court upheld that law in 2023.
6. Hindus argue both sides of these cases. Animal welfare campaigners appeal to ahimsa against practices they call cruel, while defenders appeal to regional tradition and to the claim that the animals concerned are honoured rather than harmed.

Suicide and euthanasia

1. The dharma texts condemn atmahatya, self-killing, in strong terms. They treat it as destruction of a body given for working out karma, and the funeral rites owed to the dead were traditionally withheld.
2. The tradition nonetheless recognises sanctioned forms of self-willed death. Prayopavesa, fasting to death, has been permitted for a person who has no remaining duties, is incurably ill or very aged, and undertakes it publicly and without haste.
3. The distinction turns on motive and manner. Prayopavesa is presented as a calm completion undertaken with the community's knowledge, while atmahatya is understood as an act of despair or evasion that leaves duties unfinished.
4. Coerced death is treated separately. Sati, the burning of a widow on her husband's pyre, was prohibited in Bengal in 1829, and after a case in Rajasthan in 1987 India passed a further Act penalising its glorification.
5. Indian law on end of life has moved considerably. The Supreme Court allowed passive euthanasia under safeguards in the Aruna Shanbaug case in 2011 and recognised advance directives in Common Cause in 2018, treating dying with dignity as part of the right to life.
6. Hindu opinion divides on the reasoning rather than on compassion. Some argue that suffering exhausts karma and should not be cut short, while others argue that the tradition already allows a peaceful ending.

Abortion and the unborn

1. Hindu texts treat gestation as a continuous personal life. The Garbha Upanishad describes development month by month, and the tradition generally holds that the atman is present in the embryo from a very early stage.
2. The judgment follows from that premise. Bhrunahatya, destroying an embryo, is listed among the gravest offences in the dharma literature, and some texts rank it with the killing of a Brahmin.
3. The texts are not absolute. Passages allow termination where the pregnancy will kill the mother, on the reasoning that a life already established outweighs one not yet born, and modern Hindu ethicists build on that exception.
4. Indian law took a different route. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1971 permits abortion on specified medical and social grounds, and a 2021 amendment extended the limit to twenty four weeks for certain categories of women.
5. Sex-selective abortion is where Hindu objection is loudest. Prenatal sex determination was banned in 1994 after the child sex ratio fell sharply, and Hindu organisations have campaigned against the abortion of female foetuses as a religious wrong.
6. Critics point to an unresolved tension. Hindu and secular commentators alike observe that communities which worship the Devi have still produced strong son preference, and Hindu leaders who say so call it a failure of practice rather than doctrine.

Dharma yuddha and the Gita

1. Hindu ethics does not treat all killing as equivalent. The Bhagavad Gita opens with Arjuna refusing to fight his kinsmen, and the whole text is Krishna's answer to a man who has concluded that non-violence must override his duty.
2. Krishna's argument runs on several levels. He says the atman is neither killer nor killed, that Arjuna's sva-dharma as a kshatriya requires him to defend the right, and that action performed without attachment to its results does not bind.
3. The Gita therefore endorses dharma yuddha, war fought in defence of dharma. It is treated as a duty of last resort for those whose role is protection, not as a licence available to anyone with a cause.
4. The Mahabharata attaches detailed rules. War must be declared, equals fight equals, and the unarmed, the wounded, the fleeing and non-combatants are not to be attacked, with fighting suspended after sunset.
5. The epic then shows those rules being broken by both sides and records the cost. Hindus commonly read this as the text's own warning that even a war fought for dharma corrupts the people who fight it.
6. Modern readings pull in opposite directions. Gandhi treated the battlefield as an allegory of the struggle inside a person and drew ahimsa from the text, while Tilak read it as a call to active and if necessary armed resistance, and both cited the same verses.