Mahavira — "Attachment and aversion are the root causes of Karma."
Attachment and aversion are the root causes of Karma.
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More from Mahavira
"The greatest penance is to bear all sufferings cheerfully."
"The essence of knowledge is to know the self."
"Look at the birds, how they live in the present, with no thought for the morrow."
"Happiness resides in perfect self-control."
"The light of knowledge dispels the darkness of ignorance."
About Mahavira (c. 599-527 BCE)
24th and last Tirthankara of Jainism, whose teachings of strict ahimsa (non-violence), aparigraha (non-attachment), and karma reshaped ancient Indian religion. Closely associated with The Buddha (near-contemporary moral revolutionary, also reacting against Vedic ritualism). For an intellectual contrast, see Vedic Brahmanical ritual sacrifice, the animal-sacrifice-centered Vedic religion of his era — Mahavira's ahimsa demanded total non-violence, including not eating root vegetables that kill the plant — a maximum-distance ethical move from the Vedic priestly tradition that ritually sacrificed cattle and horses. The two cleanest poles of ancient Indian religious ethics.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Karma accumulates not merely from actions but from the emotional fuel behind them — craving what we want and rejecting what we don't. Attachment pulls you toward things, aversion pushes you away, and both leave karmic residue on the soul. True freedom means responding to life with equanimity, neither grasping nor resisting, so actions leave no spiritual debt.
Relevance to Mahavira
Mahavira spent 12 years in extreme ascetic renunciation — wandering naked, accepting abuse without retaliation, owning nothing, harming nothing. He embodied this teaching literally: he severed every attachment to comfort and every aversion to suffering. His achieving kevala jnana (omniscience) was understood as the direct result of burning away all karmic residue through radical non-attachment.
The era
In 6th-century BCE India, Vedic Brahmanism centered on ritual sacrifice and caste duty as spiritual currency. Mahavira's teaching was a radical inward pivot: karma was psychological, not ritual. This Axial Age moment — shared with early Buddhism and Upanishadic inquiry — challenged priestly authority by locating liberation entirely within the individual's emotional and intentional life, not external ceremony.
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