This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Most religion documentaries pick a single site, a single festival, or a single teacher and build an hour around it. Ahimsa: Non-Violence took the opposite approach. Director Michael Tobias spent three years and filmed at nearly one hundred locations across India in pursuit of a single word, ahimsa, the Jain principle of non-injury to any living being, and the film's hour is organized entirely around how differently that one commitment shows up depending on who is living it.
For a Jain monk or nun, ahimsa can mean sweeping the path ahead with a soft broom so as not to crush an insect underfoot, or wearing a cloth over the mouth to avoid inhaling and killing microscopic life. For a lay Jain, it more often means strict vegetarianism, a livelihood chosen to avoid causing harm, and a general carefulness about causing injury, physical or otherwise, that extends well past diet into speech and intention. The film moves between these registers, treating the ascetic's extreme discipline and the layperson's everyday practice as two expressions of the same underlying idea rather than ranking one above the other.
Narrated by Lindsay Wagner and produced by Marion Hunt, the documentary premiered on PBS on Christmas Day 1987, an unusual scheduling choice for a film about a tradition with no connection to that holiday, but one that put a religion most American viewers had likely never encountered in front of a large national audience on one of the most watched nights of the broadcast year. Secondary academic discussion describes it as the first film to give Jainism this kind of sustained documentary treatment, a claim consistent with how little screen representation the tradition has received before or since.