Ascetic nonviolence and ethical intervention Rethinking Jain bioethics through the Maitreya episode of the film Ship of Theseus

Abstract

This article examines the Maitreya episode in Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus (2012) as a site for rethinking key tensions within Jain bioethics. Focusing on a Jain monk’s dilemma—whether to accept medical treatment involving animal-tested drugs— the article argues that the film does not merely illustrate Jain ethical principles but stages a structural conflict between ascetic nonviolence and forms of ethical intervention. Drawing on scholarship on Jain approaches to illness, medicine, and nonhuman life, the analysis combines close reading with conceptual inquiry. Particular attention is given to the limitations of the commonly invoked distinction between ‘orthodox’ and ‘diaspora’ Jainism, which the film complicates by presenting a figure whose ethical position remains internally unstable. Rather than resolving this tension, Ship of Theseus foregrounds the difficulty of translating abstract commitments to nonviolence into concrete decisions. The article suggests that Jain bioethics is best understood not as a coherent doctrinal system but as a field of ongoing negotiation, and that film can serve as a productive medium for exploring the limits of ethical reasoning in contemporary contexts.