Dr. Sulekh Chand Jain
Many Jains are use and also trade in jewelry items such as pearls. In fact, in my estimate, Jains participate in this trade and they own thousands of diamond and pearl distribution and wholesale selling centers in India, Belgium, the US, Canada and the UK. Similarly, Jain ladies love these items as jewelry. I personally know a few Jains in India who have large showrooms dealing in ivory products, too. It is a known fact that both of these items involve not only significant cruelty to the animals (oysters in case of pearls and elephants in case of ivory) but also actual death by torture.
Coral:
Coral reefs sustain colonies of millions of tiny animals called coral polyps. They grow at an extremely slow rate of 1 to 2 centimeters a year. Mining destroys the work of centuries in a matter of hours and kills a multitude of sea creatures. Coral is used as jewelry and in some ayurvedic medicines.
Pearls:
It could take as many as 100,000 oysters to produce a single pearl necklace. Pearls are produced by making an incision into the oyster’s soft body, and putting some gravel inside (this gravel is a bit of shell/tissue from another freshly sacrificed life). Imagine the pain of a splinter in your finger and then multiply that many times over to understand the pearl oyster’s continuous agony. An oyster is liable to die while being incised, and stands only a ten percent chance of surviving the seven years until the one single pearl is formed. Only forty percent of the pearls obtained are marketable and only five percent are, as desired by consumers, perfectly spherical. Each and every pearl represents hundreds of thousands of shells being opened up and discarded after killing those oysters. Apart from jewelry, mother of pearl, another living shell-based decoration, is often used on decorative items. For example, Lacoste polo shirts frequently use buttons made of mother of pearl.
Enamel/Meenakari:
This process involves firing a special decorative paint that contains varnish or resin. The paint, varnish, or resin could contain animal substances.
Lac/Shellac:
Used for bangles and handicrafts, these also have footprints of himsa.
Shells:
Used as temple conches, buttons, jewelry and assorted trinkets. Each shell is the home of a living marine creature known as a mollusk. The shells are dredged from the ocean bed and boiled alive to kill the animals inside before drying and selling commercially. Instead, one can buy Bishnupura Terracotta conch shells available, for example, at the Central Cottage Industries Emporium, that blow and sound like real conch shells.
Scrimshaw:
This is the art of intricately carving and decorating whalebone/tooth, ivory, or shell. I have seen the use of pearls in Jain temples on Jain idols. Similarly, during Paryshana on Bhagwan Mahavir Janam Vaachan day and swapna ceremonies, and during ghee boli for fund raising, and to develop the tempo for higher ghee bolis, Jain ladies normally sing “Aaj mahaare deraasar main, motee yee naa varshaa re,” (which means,“Let there be a shower of pearls today in our Jain temples”). I question since Moti (pearl) is a product of pure himsa to a three-sensed creature, how can we condone the use of pearls to decorate the Jain pratimas and also to sing songs which praise himsa or product of himsa?
Now you decide: is this behavior consistent with ahimsa?
