Topics in Jain Studies:
Nonviolent Theories & Practices
Rel St 126 / Phil 117
Fall 2025
CLASS TIME: Tues/Thursday 2:00-3:20pm
Anteater Learning Pavilion 2100 (map here)
Professor: Brianne Donaldson / [email protected]
DESCRIPTION
Nonviolence is more than a contemporary political and social strategy. The term describes ancient orientations to a complex cosmos through unique accounts of causation and part/whole relations. Relying on historical, textual, and philosophical methodologies, we'll begin with the ancient Jain tradition of India as a formative source for nonviolence that co-developed in a shifting Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist, and cosmopolitan context. We'll read excerpts from the Bhagavad Gītā which informed Gandhi's civil disobedience in India and South Africa and Tolstoy's anarcho-Christian pacifism.
We'll consider the science of nonviolence in dialog with materialism, positivism, quantum physics, animal behavior and social scientific research before turning to Western textual sources of nonviolence in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, including the so-called Peace Churches. Students will assess Martin Luther King, Jr.'s development of Gandhian strategies, alongside disputes with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Class sessions will include interactive engagement with religious and secular case studies from (mostly) 19th/20th-century nonviolent actions related to woman's suffrage, Indigenous resistance to land grabs, war and tax resistance, animal/earth liberation, and union/worker protections. Along the way, students will build tools and terms related to nonviolent communication, fear/anger, scapegoating, craftivism, restorative versus retributive justice, just war and its challengers, self-defense, and criticisms of nonviolence from past to present. Students will have the chance to hear from local practitioners and assess a case study from the Global Nonviolent Action Database.
OPENING RECITATION
“All beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life is dear.”
–Ācārāṅga-sūtra 1.2.3.4 ("sutra of conduct"), translated by Hermann Jacobi; this is the first of 12 aṅgas ("limbs") that make up the sacred texts of the Śvetāmbara lineage within the Jain tradition)
STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Explain features of violence and nonviolence within the Jain tradition
2. Define key concepts related to varied nonviolence theories and practices
3. Identify aims, audience, methods, and commitments in historical examples and commentaries of nonviolence
4. Gain experience in analyzing a nonviolence case study in relation to course concepts, histories, and your own personal creative response.
Image credit: Images of a cow and lion—pervasive images throughout India—are seen here drinking from the same water source, expressing an important Jain view that even animals can demonstrate ahiṃsā paramo dharmaḥ, "nonviolence is the highest dharma," in addition to the essential coexistence of other opposites such as creation and destruction. Many images also feature the offspring of each animal nursing from the other.
Nonviolence is more than a contemporary political and social strategy. The term describes ancient orientations to a complex cosmos through unique accounts of causation and part/whole relations. Relying on historical, textual, and philosophical methodologies, we'll begin with the ancient Jain tradition of India as a formative source for nonviolence that co-developed in a shifting Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist, and cosmopolitan context. We'll read excerpts from the Bhagavad Gītā which informed Gandhi's civil disobedience in India and South Africa and Tolstoy's anarcho-Christian pacifism.
We'll consider the science of nonviolence in dialog with materialism, positivism, quantum physics, animal behavior and social scientific research before turning to Western textual sources of nonviolence in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, including the so-called Peace Churches. Students will assess Martin Luther King, Jr.'s development of Gandhian strategies, alongside disputes with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Class sessions will include interactive engagement with religious and secular case studies from (mostly) 19th/20th-century nonviolent actions related to woman's suffrage, Indigenous resistance to land grabs, war and tax resistance, animal/earth liberation, and union/worker protections. Along the way, students will build tools and terms related to nonviolent communication, fear/anger, scapegoating, craftivism, restorative versus retributive justice, just war and its challengers, self-defense, and criticisms of nonviolence from past to present. Students will have the chance to hear from local practitioners and assess a case study from the Global Nonviolent Action Database.
OPENING RECITATION
“All beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life is dear.”
–Ācārāṅga-sūtra 1.2.3.4 ("sutra of conduct"), translated by Hermann Jacobi; this is the first of 12 aṅgas ("limbs") that make up the sacred texts of the Śvetāmbara lineage within the Jain tradition)
STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Explain features of violence and nonviolence within the Jain tradition
2. Define key concepts related to varied nonviolence theories and practices
3. Identify aims, audience, methods, and commitments in historical examples and commentaries of nonviolence
4. Gain experience in analyzing a nonviolence case study in relation to course concepts, histories, and your own personal creative response.
Image credit: Images of a cow and lion—pervasive images throughout India—are seen here drinking from the same water source, expressing an important Jain view that even animals can demonstrate ahiṃsā paramo dharmaḥ, "nonviolence is the highest dharma," in addition to the essential coexistence of other opposites such as creation and destruction. Many images also feature the offspring of each animal nursing from the other.
