Doctor Is Devoted to Religion That Inspired Gandhi

Just inside the entrance to Jain Center in Buena Park, a spider edges down a silky strand of web attached to one of the cubbyholes where visitors place their shoes before entering the temple. Of all the places in the world to weave a web, this spider has chosen well.

Adherents of the Jain religion revere even the tiniest of lives, down to the most microscopic of beings. It is a reverence that requires strict vegetarianism, says Jain Assn. leader Dr. Manibhai Mehta. And vegetarianism is an essential part of his religion’s theology of ahimsa, the rejection of violence to living beings either through thoughts, words or actions.

“I have a bumper sticker on the back of my car that says: Be kind to animals, do not eat them,” said Mehta, a 59-year-old Cypress urologist and president of the Federation of Jain Assns. in North America, an organization of about 90,000 members and 52 centers in the United States and Canada. The Buena Park temple, the only one in Southern California, has a membership of about 700 families, he said.

“We don’t want to kill any living beings. We don’t eat any meat, we don’t eat fish--none of the living things,” he said. “Though we believe vegetables also have life, that is the least conscious level of life.”

Some Jains, including Mehta, will not eat root vegetables because they are capable of continued, sustainable life. He won’t eat bread made with yeast. And all food must be freshly prepared to limit the number of microbes that are consumed. No leftovers.

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Although Jain is one of the smaller religions of India, its followers are considered the country’s most rigorous vegetarians. It is the faith that inspired Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi to employ nonviolence and fasting in his fight against British colonial rule.

“He was a pure vegetarian and a strict believer of nonviolence. When the fight was going on in India, he wanted a peaceful solution. He was greatly influenced by the Jain religion.”

Jainism is rooted in the 6th century, an offshoot of Hinduism with about 2 million followers. It is traced back to an ascetic named Mahavira, said to have founded the religion at the time of Buddhism’s beginnings. But Jains believe the religion to be eternal, with no beginning and no end. Mahavira is considered by followers to be the 24th patriarch of Jainism, Mehta said.

Vegetarianism is central to the Jains’ religious quest of breaking the karmic cycle of reincarnation, according to Mehta. Through a kind of spiritual evolution, humans have worked their way up from a lower order of beings, he said, and have been granted the opportunity of attaining moksha, a release from endless reincarnations into a higher realm of existence.

“We have been given this spiritual and intellectual life, to know what is good and what is bad. But if you still keep doing bad things, like killing animals, then there won’t be any attainment. You’ll be going through the same cycles. Probably due to bad karma, you may be born again as an ant, a tiger--whatever. You can fall down all the way.”

Even the unintentional killing of a creature, no matter how small, can create bad karma, Mehta said. If ants invade his home, they are treated with respect.

“We will try not to harm them at all. If they are on the sidewalk, we will try to walk around them. If they are in the house, we try to sweep them slowly into a dust pan and put them outside. We won’t kill them. Unknowingly, while doing this even, you might injure some of them. Then you should repent for it.”

For Mehta, raised in the religion by his shopkeeper parents in the tiny Indian town of Chitrasani, the pursuit of a medical career has presented challenges to his religious practices. In India, he was forced to dissect animals as part of his medical training. And as a physician, he is often called upon to do battle with assorted viruses and bacteria, even though his religion considers them living beings, entitled to life.

“There comes the fine line. It becomes a question of whether you want to save the patient, which is a bigger life and has more to do in this life, or the small creatures. You have to choose between the two. Monks won’t take antibiotics. They will let the sickness go away by itself. Our priests, when they have a terminal illness, will not take any medicine. They just let their lives go by, because they would not want to harm those bacteria.”

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Mehta says he only eats at a restaurant several times a year, but when he does, it must be purely vegetarian. If a restaurant serves both vegetarian and meat dishes, there is the unacceptable possibility of contamination from cooking utensils.

He begins a typical day with a breakfast of chapati, a circular, paper-thin, unleavened bread made fresh each day by his wife, and a cup of tea. He eats a salad or vegetarian sandwich for lunch, and rice, beans and vegetables are staples for dinner.

“When I joined Kaiser Hospital in 1974, in our meetings they usually got pizza, or something that had meat in it. So I said: ‘If you are going to have a meeting here at the hospital, you should have something vegetarian.’ Now they always have either a vegetarian pizza or salad, or something like that. If people believe it’s going to help their own lives, they’ll change.”

While Mehta is happy to be an influence on the lives of others, he does not proselytize.

“Each person has to go into it, work it out and do the best he can. We don’t tell everybody to become vegetarian. We will never go from door to door to tell everybody to become Jain. It has to come from within, from your own mind, from your own conscience, that to attain this perfect place, you have to do no harm to other beings.”

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Profile: Dr. Manibhai Mehta

Age: 59

Hometown: Chitrasani, in the state of Gujarat, India

Residence: Cypress

Family: Married to Savita; two grown sons

Education: Medical degree from B.J. Medical College in India; a five-year residency as a urologist and surgeon at Hahnemann Hospital, Philadelphia

Background: Moved to the United States in 1968 for graduate medical studies; moved to Orange County in 1973; created a meeting place for Jain religion followers at his home in 1976; helped raise $1.2 million to build the first Southern California Jain Center in 1987, in Buena Park, while president of the Orange County Jain Assn.

Current position: Urologist at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower; president of the Federation of Jain Assns. in North America

Vegetarianism: “If the whole world was vegetarian, there would still be enough food in this world. They are feeding chicken with all this maize and corn and everything to get the meat. With that same food, you could feed 10 people instead of just one chicken.”

Source: Dr. Manibhai Mehta; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times