598
That grounding in numeric characterizations was utterly revolutionized in
Jainism, as it sought to transform the multiplicity of rules, orders, stages, restrictions, and veritable laws of natural behavior into ethical activism, principally,
ahimsa; a non-violence oriented to every single individual of every species, organic
and inorganic, including grains of sand and dew drops. Imagine such preconditions
of Nature’s infinities dictating entirely new contexts, functions, equations, sets, subsets, and sets of subsets all oriented to how we as humans ought to behave, as a very
function of Natural Law.
Most radically, in terms of the history of environmental thought and injunctions
regarding moral behavior, Jain traditions—while developing numbers of an exponentially unprecedented extant—never ceased to consolidate the vastness of
Fig. 63.1 Kalpasutra Jain manuscript page (ca. AD 1470), traditionally ascribed to Bhadrabahu
(fourth century BCE), containing biographies of Parshvanatha and Mahavira. (Private Collection).
(Photo © M.C. Tobias)
63 The Ecological Summons of Jain Mathematical Calculations