Reverence for the Smalls in Jain Yoga

a presentation for the Centre of Yoga Studies Postgraduate Conference

Every living being possesses a soul (jīva) worthy of autonomy in Jain cosmology. This includes embodied beings of the tiniest magnitude, like microorganisms and bacteria.

The Jains have developed a unique soteriological path (mokṣamārga) that honors this view. The path is based on a metaphysically dualist ontology; and a view of karmic law (karmavad) as an ethical, metaphysical, and cosmological principle that governs life (Fisher, 2017: 644).

Right conduct is the third prong on the path and today is largely guided by the ethic of ahiṃsā (non-violence, or non-harm) toward even the smallest souls: the harm done to life-forms, no matter how miniscule, is the primary cause of karmic bondage. But it is impossible to avoid wholesale harm to living beings because the world is filled with microscopic and submicroscopic organisms: most human actions like eating, walking and breathing involve destruction of infinite microscopic beings called nigodas. Jains engage in occasionally drastic behavior modification to avoid, as much as possible, the eradication (or creation) of life forms. Jains cultivate, in other words, a “nigoda consciousness.”

Right conduct is also pursued through austerities (tapas), meditation (dhyana) and yoga: practices that encourage an attention to detail and interconnectedness, honed through nigoda consciousness.

With a sensitivity toward avoiding the green gaze of environmental scholarship, this paper engages primary and secondary textual and video material to explore how a yoga practice focused on microorganisms might be both liberatory for an individual and socially advantageous for the collective.

WATCH BELOW (paper begins at ~19:15)