宗教的生命倫理に基づく食のタブー : 禁止された食物と不殺生

Food taboos are widely seen all over the world. This is a complicated phenomenon in which various elements in each cultural area are intricately intertwined. One of the strictest food taboos is based on religious reasons. Grounds for food taboos in each religion are presented in each doctrine. However, holiness, purity, impurity etc. are vague ideas from an objective viewpoint. Therefore, it might be difficult for those outside of a certain religious group to accept these prohibitions. Food taboos are seen in the doctrine of the Jainism too. Jainism regards non-violence (ahiṃsā) as the highest virtue and has practiced non-violence for about 2,500 years in India. There are two kinds of food taboos in Jainism. One is intended for the mendicant and the other is intended for the layperson. The purpose of this paper is to clarify a part of food taboos of Jainism by focusing on the latter. To consider food taboos in Jainism, this paper adopts the following order. In case of Jainism, it is expected that non-violence has a big influence on food taboos. Therefore, firstly, we survey the Jaina view of life and Jaina bioethics. The Jaina view of life distinguishes immobile beings (sthāvara) and mobile beings (trasa). Furthermore, it holds that the hierarchy of the living thing is based on the number of sense organs. In this paper we confirm that these greatly influence the degree of violence (hiṃsā). Secondly, we investigate the prohibited food on the basis of the original text and the previous works. Concretely, we examine the one that is called "Fundamental virtue (mūlaguṇa)" of the layperson. By this procedure, we clarify the next two points. The first is that the texts are divided into four types. The second is that six kinds of food taboos, i.e. the abandonment of meat, the abandonment of alcohol, the abandonment of honey, the abandonment of five kinds of plants, the abandonment of the midnight snack, and the abandonment of non-filtered water are seen in these texts. Finally, we consider the conditions and the reasons which bring about the above-mentioned food taboos in detail. We can make the following conclusions on the basis of such considerations. That is, the standard of the food taboos of Jainism are extremely lucid from the viewpoint of the non-Jain too, because they are based on non-violence alone