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now twenty-five centuries have passed: Jaina monks and nuns are still walking bare-footed on the dusty roads in hot weather in a country like India. You should see their feet; tears will come to your eyes. The skin of their feet is all broken, as broken as when for two or three years rains don't come and the earth breaks; and blood is oozing out of those wounds. Still they have to go on walking; they cannot use a vehicle, because in those days again a vehicle meant horse-driven, bullock-driven -- and that was violence.
And I can understand that it is violence. Who are you to force poor animals to pull your vehicles and to pull you? But Mahavira was not aware that there would be cars which would not be pulled by horses but would have horsepower without horses, that there would be trains, electrical vehicles. He was not aware of that, that there would be airplanes with the least possibility of violence.
Even walking you will do more violence because it is not only when you kill an elephant that it is violence. According to Jainism the soul has the same status in the ant, the smallest ant, and the biggest elephant. Only the bodies are different -- the souls are the same. So when you are walking on the road you may be killing many insects; not only insects, even when you are breathing you are killing very small living cells in the air. Just by the hot air coming out of your nose, your mouth, they are being killed.
Perhaps for the Jaina monk and nun the airplane is the most non-violent vehicle. When I suggested it to Jaina monks they said, "What are you saying? If somebody hears it we will be thrown out, expelled!"
I could convince just one Jaina monk, and certainly he was expelled. He was a little stupid. We both were staying in one temple, and I told him, "You unnecessarily walk ten miles every day from this place to the city, while a car comes for me; you can go with me."
He said, "But if anybody sees?"
I said, "We can always manage." He used to have a bamboo mat, so I said, "You put the bamboo mat on the sofa in the car, and sit on the bamboo mat."
He said, "What will that do?"
I said, "You can simply say, `I
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