In ancient India, Jainism’s founding commitments to non-violence (ahimsa), non-possession (aparigraha), and asceticism made it a critique of materialism, power, and social hierarchy, above all the hierarchies entrenched in Vedic Brahmanism. The tradition was built on ethical rigor, spiritual liberation, and a refusal to be attached to material wealth and power. But those ascetic ideals shared the tradition with royal patronage from the start. As patronage won ground over the centuries, the ideals were co-opted, reshaped to serve elite interests, and stripped of their radical force. The erasure had named agents at every stage: colonial classification, medieval conquest and modern religious nationalism each did its part.
This is a critique from inside the tradition. It looks at how the powerful appropriated Jainism’s radical ascetic ideals to reinforce social hierarchies and marginalize subaltern communities. It also looks at how Jainism can be reclaimed for social justice, by reading its core principles alongside leftist ideals of equality, empowerment, and systemic change. Under the names Left Jainism and Jain Leftism, I argue for a Jainism that challenges modern power structures and the exploitation that comes with them.
What Jainism Was Built to Refuse
To see what was co-opted, it helps to see what the tradition was built to refuse. Ascetic Jainism took shape as a renunciant movement outside Brahmanical orthodoxy, but not outside royal favor. Its founder came from a ruling clan, and Jain tradition names kings such as Bimbisara and Ajatashatru among its followers. The refusal was built into the ascetic ideals, and there the convergence with anarchist thought isn’t a modern imposition but a structural resemblance.
The resemblance runs in five directions. Jainism is non-theistic. The universe is eternal and sustains itself, so it doesn’t need a supreme creator deity. That worldview rejects divine authority and the hierarchies that come with it, just as anarchism rejects unjustified authority in the state, capitalism, and organized religion. Ahimsa reaches well past a ban on physical harm to an ethics that covers thought, speech, and action. That lines up with the anarcho-pacifist position that violence is inherently oppressive and that liberation can be reached only through non-violent means. Aparigraha, the vow of non-possession, matches the anarchist critique of capitalism’s cycle of production and consumption, and voluntary simplicity shows that a fulfilling life is possible without accumulation. Mahavira rejected the caste system and taught that anyone could reach spiritual liberation, whatever their social status. That egalitarian ethos anticipates the anarchist commitment to anti-oppression. And the Jain community is decentralized, with wandering monks and nuns who rely on the lay community for basic needs. It models interdependence and reciprocity, the anarchist principle of self-governance through voluntary association and mutual aid.
An anarchist Jainism invites us to cultivate a way of being in the world that is rooted in compassion, non-violence, and a deep respect for the inherent dignity of all life. By embodying these principles in our daily lives and in our communities, we can begin to create the conditions for a truly free and flourishing existence.
That architecture had five load-bearing walls. Over the centuries, patronage found a way to decorate every one of them.
How Patronage Defanged Renunciation
In doctrine, ahimsa meant a radical non-violence that reached past humans to all sentient beings and rejected the ritual animal sacrifice at the center of Vedic Brahmanism. Aparigraha called for renouncing wealth and possessions, which set Jainism against elites accumulating power and resources. Both values aimed to disrupt the social order by tying spiritual liberation to rejecting worldly attachment and power.
As Jainism grew prominent and drew more patronage from kings, merchants, and wealthy elites, its ascetic principles were gradually diluted and bent to serve the ruling classes. A radical rejection of accumulation became a way to legitimize those who held power. Elites took up the outward forms of Jain asceticism, sponsoring temples and supporting monastic communities to earn spiritual merit, while keeping their wealth and privileges. Jainism’s radical potential became a tool of social control that pacified challenges to the status quo.
Ahimsa Has to Reach Structural Violence
Ahimsa, non-violence, sits at the heart of Jainism and shows most visibly in vegetarianism, in protecting animals, and in avoiding harm to any living being. It’s often praised as one of Jainism’s great contributions to ethical thought. But historically it’s been applied narrowly, to individual behavior, and not to the systemic and structural forces that produce violence across a society.
Jain merchants and business owners, for instance, have often benefited from economic systems built on exploitative labor while keeping their personal commitment to non-violence. Exploiting workers, particularly those from lower castes or economically marginalized communities, is structural violence that traditional readings of ahimsa overlook. Economic inequality and social exclusion also persist inside Jain communities, however much those communities stress ethical purity and non-violence in personal conduct.
Non-violence that doesn’t touch the systemic injustices harming society’s most vulnerable members isn’t yet non-violence. Jainism Already Has Room for Queer People applies the same argument to the exclusion of queer and trans Jains from temples, rituals, and leadership.
Recovering the Vows’ Original Force
Recovering Jainism’s ascetic values means examining how historical power bent and distorted them. The aim is to recover the original force of its core principles as tools for liberation and social change rather than to abandon them.
That means reading Jain values against the problems of the present. Ahimsa has to extend past personal morality to a commitment to confronting structural violence, inequality, and exploitation.
Aparigraha, likewise, has to become a critique of capitalist accumulation and economic injustice instead of a purely personal ethic of non-possession. Both values need to point toward collective liberation and systemic change, so that Jainism becomes a force against the power structures that sustain oppression and inequality.
Jainism also has to renew its commitment to the marginalized and oppressed and put the needs and voices of people historically excluded from it at the center. That means returning to the spiritual and ethical rigor of Mahavira’s teachings while taking part in contemporary struggles for social justice and equity.
Left Jainism and Jain Leftism
Left Jainism and Jain Leftism are new frameworks for practicing Jain values alongside today’s struggles for justice, equality, and systemic change.
Left Jainism reads core Jain values critically, treating ahimsa and aparigraha as tools for social justice rather than only personal commitments. It calls on the Jain community to join movements for labor rights, caste abolition, environmental justice, and economic redistribution.
Jain Leftism, for its part, fuses Jain ethics with leftist political ideology and presses for systemic change through non-violent political resistance and collective action. It makes ahimsa the foundation of political activism. On this view, keeping Jain values means personal piety plus taking an active part in the struggle against exploitative forces like neoliberal capitalism, caste hierarchy, and environmental degradation.
What Jain Leftism Would Do
Reclamation also takes praxis: an effort to challenge and reshape modern society through Jain ethics. Grounded in Left Jainism and Jain Leftism, that praxis has several dimensions:
- Confronting Capitalism and Wealth Accumulation: Jain Leftism challenges the structures of capitalism and the logic of accumulation. Aparigraha traditionally stresses individual detachment from possessions; Jain Leftism reads it as a collective rejection of the capitalist structures that concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. That means rethinking wealth radically, dismantling the systems that create inequality rather than treating its symptoms.
- Dismantling Caste and Structural Oppression: Jain Leftism confronts Jainism’s complicity in upholding caste hierarchies. It works to dismantle caste oppression inside Jain communities and beyond, by supporting movements for caste abolition and by addressing caste privilege in daily life and religious practice.
- Engaging in Environmental Justice: Jain Leftism treats environmental degradation and climate change as forms of systemic violence that fall hardest on marginalized communities. Jains have to take collective action against the root causes of environmental destruction and treat environmental justice as inseparable from social justice.
- Building Solidarity with Subaltern Communities: Jain Leftism calls for solidarity with subaltern and marginalized communities. Jains from privileged backgrounds have to recognize how they’ve benefited from systems of oppression and put their resources behind movements for justice and collective liberation.
- Expanding Non-violence into Political Resistance: Jain Leftism extends ahimsa to non-violent political resistance against oppressive systems, and calls for active engagement in movements to dismantle economic, social, and environmental oppression.
From Personal Piety to Collective Action
Left Jainism and Jain Leftism ask Jains to take the material conditions of the modern world as seriously as the spiritual teachings. They keep the teachings’ integrity while moving from personal piety to collective action against the structures of power and inequality that co-opted Jain asceticism. That reimagines the future as much as it rereads the past.
Both frameworks need action as well as intellectual engagement: acts of solidarity, resistance, and empowerment rooted in Jainism’s core principles and aimed at the pressing problems of the present. Jainism can then be a force for liberation again, for individuals seeking spiritual purification and for a world that puts collective well-being ahead of individual gain.