Bali - Preface

The dialectic found some resolution when the Brahmins
renounced blood sacrifice. Miniature figurines, made of dough,
were substituted for live animals, a practice that continues
to this day. Still, the Jains argued that this was no solution.
Although no animals were slaughtered and no meat consumed,
these figures of dough, mimicking the forms of real animals,
clearly carried the original violent impulse within them.
And why dough rather than, say, mud or chalk? Because an
offering makes sense only if it is meant as food for
gods and is, therefore, cooked and consumed by the devotees. Thus
the priests had merely replaced actual violence with violence
in intention, which, said the Jains, was no less dehumanizing.
This argument gave the debate a much more complex ethical twist.
The Jain position raises the question: if intended violence
condemns one as surely as actual violence, that is, if one is
morally responsible for merely intending to commit an
act one has not actually carried out in real life, is one not shutting
oneself up in a solipsistic world, a bleak, guilt-ridden existence
with no hope of absolution?