Destructive Emotions Jain Perspectives

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Destructive Emotions: Jain Perspectives represents the culmination of Professor Mardia's three decades of research into Kasaya, the Jain concept of the passions (or destructive emotions). which play a crucial role in the soul's accumulation of karmic matter, thereby perpetuating the cycle of life, death and rebirth, according to the Jain tradition. In a manner reminiscent of The Scientific Foundations of Jainism, which distilled the essence of Jain belief into an axiomatic formulation that has come to be known as the Four Noble Truths of Jainism, Professor Mardia draws upon original scriptural sources and presents a comprehensive survey of the vast literature on Kasaya - filling a significant gap in the modern research - and follows it with a summary and synthesis in the form of the Four Principles of Kasaya Doctrine, offering a transformative roadmap to liberation from destructive emotions (Kasaya-Anger, Pride, Deceit, Greed).

KANTI V. MARDIA, OBE is Senior Research Professor at University of Leeds and Visiting Professor at University of Oxford. He is the founder of the Yorkshire Jain Foundation and Jain Noble Truths Association. His prior publications include The Scientific Foundations of Jainism, Living Jainism: An Ethical Science (with Aidan Rankin), and the booklet Jain Thoughts and Prayers. In addition to his contributions in statistics to Jain scholarship, his distinguished career is marked by the Guy Medal in Silver (Royal Statistical Society), the Wilks Memorial Medal (American Statistical Association), and a Lifetime Achievement Award (International Indian Statistical Association). He is also the recipient of the Mahatma Gandhi Medal of Honour (NRI Institute) and the OneJAIN Life Achievement Award (Jain All-Party Parliamentary Group). He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2023 New Year Honours.

Mardia's emphasis in Jain scholarship has been to present 'Jainism' not as anism, but as the science of 'Jainness' (Jainattva, or the Jain spirit), while finding ways to make the ancient Jain Dharma more accessible to younger generations of Jains and the wider public alike.

With the bombardment of information technology, mass communication, and the emergence of social media, the twenty-first century has brought more mental pressures to every individual as well as to every community. These pressures have been accelerated by the unprecedented challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, in addition to its toll on humanity, has limited our social interaction and forced our lives online more than ever before. A new culture has come, bringing with it entirely new stressors. From a social science point of view, we are seeing a major step change. Our responses to these stressors and pressures are fuelled primarily by passions, or destructive emotions. Indeed, passion (kasaya) is one of the most fundamental concepts of Jain thinking, at the root of nearly every aspect of Jain science and psychology. This book explores the four main negatives or kasayas according to Jainism - anger, pride, deceit and greed and how to overcome them.

Moral reflection on destructive emotions, and in particular kasayas, has roots in both religious teaching and philosophical thinking. Through these means, countless people over the centuries have been influenced positively and profoundly in their behaviour and self-understanding. This influence continues today, and more recently has been broadened with the knowledge gained in the study of psychology.

Modern thinking has concentrated much more on aspects of the management of anger in comparison to all other negatives, as evidenced by an industry of self-help books and the development of practical psychology. However, with the proliferation of capitalism and the worldwide rise of a billionaire class, greed (in particular, the accumulation of wealth) is practically seen as something to be celebrated - one need look no further than the 1987 film Wall Street and Gordon Gekko's pronouncement that "greed... is good"; despite being the antihero, far too many have seemingly taken Gekko's message to heart. There also have been a few movies on the seven deadly sins of Christian theology (pride, greed, anger, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth - analogous to the Jain negatives, with some direct overlap) as well as a set of seven books on the same subject from different authors, published by Oxford University Press between 2004 and 2006. What this indicates is that there is a real interest in destructive emotions, both academically and in the popular imagination.

It therefore seems timely to present the application of the ideas, as fostered and practised in a religious context over the centuries, to modern life and secular society more generally.

At first glance, it might seem surprising that Professor Mardia, who has had a long and distinguished career as a world-renowned statistician, would embark upon the challenging task of publishing a work focused on aspects of Jain karma theory. However, shortly after migrating to the United Kingdom from Rajasthan in the early 1960s to pursue his academic career, by observing his own children, he became convinced that there was a need for the fundamental tenets of the Jain tradition to be discussed in a manner that would appeal to a younger generation of Jains, particularly to those who had not grown up in India. He also thought that it was important to represent this dharma in a way that would enable contemporary readers to understand the relevance of this ancient tradition in today's world. His interest in pursuing these goals never wavered in spite of the demands that came with serving as Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Leeds beginning in 1973, and after retirement in 2000, holding the positions of Senior Research Professor at Leeds and Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford since 2013. In fact, in his inaugural address at Leeds in 1975, he discussed one of the foundational aspects of Jainism, a multifaceted view of reality, and its relevance to the field of statistics.

It was fifteen years later, in 1990, that his efforts would culminate in the publication of The Scientific Foundations of Jainism (SFJ), although the techniques that he employed in this work had been developed over a number of years. He first presented the four axioms that serve as its foundational structure at a gathering of community members in Leicester in 1979. More recently, using terminology commonly associated with Buddhism, Professor Mardia has called these axioms the Four Noble Truths of Jainism. As discussed in his article "Jainism in Scientific Terms" in Jainpedia, (1) the soul is contaminated with karmic matter and longs to be purified; (2) there is a hierarchy of life because living beings differ due to variations in density and types of karmic matter bound with the soul; (3) karmic bondage leads the soul through these different states of existence; and (4) karmic bondage, or fusion, is due to perverted views, non-restraint, carelessness, passions, and activities. Subsets of (4) are the role of violence in karmic bondage and the antidote to this bondage by helping others towards spiritual liberation and observing various austerities.