Aparigraha

Aparigraha, non-possession or non-grasping, is the fifth of the Jain great vows and the fifth of the yamas in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Its subject is attachment rather than property as such: what binds is not the object held but the holding of it.

For Jain mendicants the vow is absolute, and the tradition's two communities divide on how absolutely. Digambara monks of the highest grade own nothing whatever, clothing included. Svetambara mendicants wear white robes and carry a small set of permitted articles, an alms bowl, a broom of soft fibres for clearing the path of insects before sitting or walking, and, in the Sthanakvasi and Terapanthi traditions, a cloth worn over the mouth. The disagreement is not about the vow but about whether any minimum of possession can be compatible with it.

For laypeople the vow becomes a voluntary limitation: a person sets a ceiling on wealth, land and goods and treats whatever exceeds it as surplus to be given away. The Jain lay tradition developed this into a practice of periodic self-assessment, and it is one reason Jain communities have historically been notable both for commercial success and for an unusually high level of charitable endowment, a combination sometimes described from outside as a tension, and explained within the tradition by the distinction between using wealth and being attached to it.

The vow's most interesting extension is intellectual. Jain writers connect aparigraha to anekantavada, arguing that insisting on one's own view as the complete truth is itself a form of grasping, and that non-attachment therefore requires holding one's opinions with the qualification that syadvada prescribes. This makes intellectual humility an ascetic discipline rather than merely a social virtue, and it is the strongest single link between Jain ethics and Jain epistemology.

In the Yoga Sutras the same restraint appears fifth, with the statement that when non-possession is established, knowledge of the how and why of births arises (2.39). In the modern period aparigraha has been taken up in environmental and anti-consumerist argument, by Gandhi in particular, who connected it to his doctrine of trusteeship, the position that wealth is held on behalf of the community rather than owned outright. That is a genuine development of the classical vow into a social programme, and it has been both praised as a recovery of its spirit and criticised as a convenient accommodation with the possession of wealth.

The Digambara-Svetambara disagreement over how absolutely non-possession must be practiced has a striking parallel in medieval Christian monastic history, where an almost identical argument over the limits of a poverty vow split a major religious order and drew papal intervention.

The Franciscan poverty controversy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries turned on whether Francis of Assisi's original rule, requiring friars to own nothing whatever, could be maintained by a rapidly growing order that needed buildings and resources to function. The Spiritual Franciscans insisted on a rigorous reading close in spirit to the Digambara position, holding that friars could have only the use of goods owned by others, never ownership itself, and treated any softening as a betrayal of Francis's founding vision. The Conventual Franciscans accepted a workable arrangement in which the order held property collectively, or had it held in trust by the papacy on the order's behalf, closer in spirit to the Svetambara acceptance of a minimal permitted set of possessions.

The dispute escalated further than its Jain counterpart: Pope John XXII, in the 1320s, condemned the Spiritual view that Christ and the apostles had owned absolutely nothing as heretical, precipitating some Spirituals' departure into open dissent and, in a few cases, conflict with the Inquisition. The comparison illuminates a structural point: a rule stated in maximal terms for isolated ascetics generates institutional strain once lived out by a growing community needing material infrastructure, and the two traditions facing the identical problem resolved it with very different degrees of institutional peace and violence.