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(RNS) — On the night of Diwali, Nov. 8, as lamps go up in Hindu homes across America, many Jain families will be keeping a different vigil. For Jains, this new-moon night marks the moment some 2,500 years ago when Mahavira, the 24th and last Tirthankara of our age, attained nirvana at Pavapuri in present-day Bihar, India. The Kalpa Sutra, one of Jainism’s most beloved texts, records that the kings who were gathered there lit lamps that night, reasoning that since the light of intelligence had gone, they would make an illumination of material things. Jains have lit lamps on this night ever since.
The next morning, delegates from nearly every nation on Earth open COP31, the United Nations climate summit in Antalya, Türkiye. The timing is an accident of the lunar calendar. The lesson it offers is not.
Mahavira was born a prince. At 30 he walked away from his palace, his wealth and, in one strand of the tradition, eventually even his clothing. At the heart of what he went on to teach is aparigraha, non-possession, the fifth of the great Jain vows. Monks and nuns keep it absolutely. Lay Jains take a gentler form, parigraha-parimana: a vow to set a limit on what one will own, and to stick to that limit.
That is a strange idea in a season built for acquisition. Diwali, like Christmas, has become a shopping festival. In India, the weeks around it are the busiest retail stretch of the year; in America, Diwali sales now share ad space with Black Friday. There is nothing wrong with gifts. But Mahavira’s nirvana poses the question that festivals are designed to avoid: How much is enough?
Climate diplomacy avoids the same question. COP negotiations focus, understandably, on supply: how quickly to phase down fossil fuels; how much finance to move; how to adapt. They rarely ask how much we consume. Yet Oxfam has estimated that the richest tenth of humanity accounts for roughly half of all emissions. Efficiency alone has not closed the gap. Our cars grew more efficient and then grew larger; our homes grew better insulated and then grew bigger. Economists call this the rebound effect. A Jain would call it parigraha: attachment that expands to fill whatever room is made for it.
Jain ethics offers three things the climate conversation lacks.
The first is a limit chosen in advance. The parimana vow is not austerity imposed from outside. It is a ceiling people set for themselves before desire sets it for them. That is close to what climate policy calls a carbon budget, except that it is held as a personal and communal discipline rather than only a national target. Imagine households, congregations and universities pledging a cap on consumption and reviewing it each year, the way Jains reflect on their lapses and ask forgiveness during the festival of Paryushan.
The second is a wider circle of concern. In Jain thought, ahimsa, nonviolence, extends to every living being, down to the simplest life in earth, water, air and plants. Jains do not need to be persuaded that a river or a forest has moral standing; their cosmology assumes it. In 2019, the Federation of Jain Associations in North America issued a Jain Declaration on the Climate Crisis, building on the Jain Declaration on Nature of 1990 and grounded in exactly these principles.
The third is a way to argue without breaking. Anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness, holds that no single viewpoint grasps the whole truth. Climate summits are arenas of hardened positions: rich nations against poor ones; fossil-fuel producers against island states. Anekantavada does not erase disagreement. It insists that each party sees some part of what is true. A negotiator who believed that might listen differently.
None of this makes Jains saints of sustainability. The Jain community is, on the whole, prosperous. Its weddings can be lavish, and its diaspora flies often. Jain scriptures would call much of that a failure of the very vow I am describing. But a tradition is not measured by whether its followers always live up to its ideals. It is measured by whether those ideals give them something worth falling short of. Aparigraha does.
The lamps lit at Pavapuri were a substitute for a light the world had lost. This year, as Diwali gives way to Antalya, there is a better substitute available: not more lights, but fewer things. Mahavira walked away from a palace. Most of us will not need to do anything so dramatic. We only need to decide, before the next sale and the next summit, what is enough.
(Pankaj Jain is professor and chair of philosophy and director of The India Centre at FLAME University in India. His books include “Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach” and “Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability.” He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Worldviews and Religions. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)