Big news in our community: The Jain Center of Southern California (JSSC) has decided to serve all vegan meals starting next year, with a transition period this year. Pravin uncle of the JAINA Education Committee gives us the inside story here .
As nicely described by Sagar of Young Jains here, the JSSC is the third Jain organization, after the Sri Digambar Jain Association in 2016 and Young Jains UK in 2017 to go vegan.
This is the first one in North America to go vegan. Fellow Jains have called on Northern California, Houston, Chicago and others to follow. Let’s hope they do. And with the JSSC hosting the next JAINA convention, we can hope that the biennial convention of North American Jains just might make a bold step that’s been a long time coming.
We Jains have a deep caring for all living beings and it’s an easy argument to eliminate dairy because we are saving the lives of dairy cows and their calves, egg laying hens and their chicks.
If we reflect on Earth Day, and the myriad ways that farming animals contributes to climate change, pollutes the water and air, uses inordinate amounts of water and land, we can see the less direct but still important benefits of going vegan. Books like Drawdown list plant rich diets as #4 in the list of most impactful steps to save the planet and all the living beings on it.
Our ancient practices should incorporate the ways that modern life can hurt living beings, directly and indirectly. Practicing aparigraha and limiting our consumption, lowering our himsa footprint and our carbon footprint are fruitful areas of practice.
A new What’s App group is hoping to dialogue with Jain sadhus and sadhvis to encourage our practice to be even more consistent with ahimsa.
And the Plant Powered Earth Holder’s Sangha shows us an example of a community with Asian roots and a global membership of laywomen and laymen, nuns and monks, that gently encourage their fellow practitioner’s to go vegan https://earthholder.org/nourish/.
Happy Earth Day!!
Vegan Jains 