Q1.
Observe the above panel (from a Jain temple in New Delhi). What is striking about it? What messages does it carry?
Answer
What is striking is what the animals are doing — or rather, what they are not doing. Look at the carving on page 118 in detail:
- On the left, a lion, with its full mane, has lowered its head into a large lotus-shaped water basin.
- On the right, a cow has lowered its head into the very same basin, so close that the two heads almost touch.
- A lion cub stands quietly under the lion; a calf is feeding at the cow's side.
- Behind them are trees, rocky hills and birds in the sky — an ordinary forest, not a temple courtyard.
- Not one animal is crouching, fleeing, or watching the other. There is no fear anywhere in the picture.
A lion and a cow are, in nature, hunter and prey. A calf standing that close to a lion should not be alive. The sculptor has taken the most predictable violence in the animal world and simply switched it off.
| Message | How the carving says it |
|---|---|
| 1. Ahimsa reaches every living creature | Not only human beings. Mahāvīra's words, quoted on page 116: “All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away” |
| 2. Non-violence produces fearlessness | The calf is the proof. Where nobody intends harm, nobody needs to be afraid — and the message is as much about the fear as about the violence |
| 3. All creatures are interdependent | They share one basin. Jainism “insists on the interconnectedness and interdependence of all creatures, from humans to invisible organisms, as they support each other and cannot live without one another” |
| 4. Enmity is something that can be given up | The lion has not been caged or defeated; it has simply stopped. That is the Jain sense of jina, 'conqueror' — the conquest is of one's own ignorance and attachments, not of an enemy |
| 5. It applies to us | A temple panel is placed where worshippers will see it every day. The lion is not being asked to become a cow — it is being asked not to hurt |
Where this image comes from: Jain tradition describes the samavasaraṇa, the great circular assembly in which a Tīrthaṅkara preaches, and in which animals that are natural enemies sit peacefully side by side to listen. A lion and a cow drinking from one vessel is a familiar shorthand for that idea, and Jain temples across India carve some version of it. So the panel is not simply a pretty animal scene — it is a summary of the whole teaching in one picture.
Try this: the same idea turns up in the very next box on the page. If ahimsa also means refusing violence in thought, then ask yourself who the lion and the cow are in your own classroom — the person you are certain you cannot get along with. The panel says that pair can share a bowl of water.