I grew up surrounded by violence. At home, there was domestic violence. In school, there was bullying, and I experienced it from both sides—sometimes as a target, sometimes as a participant. By the time I was about twenty, I had come to deeply abhor violence in all its forms. Moreover, I felt disoriented, unsettled, and increasingly troubled by the direction my life seemed to be taking.

Around that time, my brother began exploring Eastern philosophy and religious traditions, and he started giving me books. I read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, several works by Alan Watts, and, most importantly, Louis Fischer’s biography of Mahatma Gandhi. That book changed my life. Gandhi’s central message—that through inner transformation one can transform the world—struck me with unexpected force. If violence could be uprooted within oneself, he suggested, its grip on the world could loosen as well. His life offered a radical example of how disciplined nonviolence could reshape not only a person, but families, communities, and even nations.

At the same time, my brother and sister had both become vegetarian and vegan. Like many meat-eaters, I responded defensively. I repeated the familiar arguments: that a plant-based diet was unhealthy or unnatural, that humans needed animal protein to survive, that animals existed for our consumption. We debated often—and, slowly, I realized I was losing those debates.

During this period, I was working a low-paid job that unexpectedly accelerated my awakening. Every morning before dawn, I went to work at a Renaissance Fair food operation. My task was to stand in a freezer with an iron bar, smashing ice off boxes of dismembered turkey legs so they could be cooked and sold. I cleaned gristle from chicken, trimmed fat from ribs, and handled animal remains for hours at a time. Even as someone accustomed to eating meat, the experience was grotesque and deeply unsettling.

Ironically, one of the few benefits of the job was free food. I could eat as much meat as I wanted. But after spending hours immersed in that environment, the last thing I wanted was to eat flesh. Something had shifted. While intellectually, I had already lost the argument, what finally broke through was not reason alone, but feeling—disgust, shame, and a dawning sense of moral clarity.

Much of what I was reading at the time, especially Buddhist literature, spoke about compassion for all sentient beings. I realized, uncomfortably, that compassion was not something I readily felt. I could feel anger, joy, sadness—but compassion seemed abstract, almost theoretical. I wanted to cultivate it. Living in a rural area near sheep and lambs, I would quietly sit and try to feel some genuine connection with them, to let compassion become something embodied rather than imagined.

Then everything seemed to converge at once. I had a stark realization: the violence we see in the world is inseparable from the violence we carry within ourselves, and that inner violence is often rooted in unchecked desire—especially the desire for sensory gratification. I began to see how habits of consumption could dull empathy and make other forms of harm easier to rationalize.

This inner reckoning did not pass quietly. I experienced vivid dreams and night terrors—images of animals being harmed, and of myself caught in violent confrontations. It felt as though years of suppressed violence were rising to the surface and burning off. Shortly thereafter, I became vegetarian, and then vegan.

For me, as it was for Gandhi, diet was never just about food. It was inseparable from ethics, spirituality, politics, and personal transformation. For my undergraduate work, I began studying nonviolent movements across the world—Indian Independence, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, Solidarity in Poland, and democratic movements in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Again and again, I encountered the same insight: nonviolence was not merely a moral ideal but a powerful, effective force in history. After completing my undergraduate degree, I felt called to explore the spiritual roots of nonviolence more deeply. Through my reading of Gandhi, I had also begun to learn about the profound influence of Jain thought on his understanding of ahiṃsā, and this drew me increasingly toward the Jain tradition itself. Wanting to engage these teachings at their source, I sought out Professor Padmanabh Jaini at the University of California, Berkeley.

When I first met him, I told him—somewhat ambitiously—that I wanted to learn Ardhamāgadhī so I could read the Jain scriptures in their original language. He listened carefully, smiled, and replied that he would be happy to teach me Ardhamāgadhī once my Sanskrit was strong enough that he could pull any book from his shelf and I would be able to translate it. That conversation did not discourage me; it clarified the path forward. Inspired by his confidence and guidance, I immediately enrolled in Sanskrit and went on to study it intensively for several years.

That path led me into years of study and eventually into my current work as a professor of Sanskrit and Jain Studies at Arihanta Institute. Interestingly, later this year, I will travel to Ahmedabad to continue studying Jain languages and to work on a textbook devoted to Ardhamāgadhī. Although Professor Jaini passed away before I could fulfill that original promise, I feel that I am still walking the path he set before me.

My awakening to ahiṃsā did not end with renunciation; it opened into inspiration. What began as a rejection of violence gradually became a positive commitment to a different way of living—one shaped by the examples of Gandhi and the dharma traditions that taught him, and that continue to teach me. Nonviolence, as I came to understand it, is not merely the absence of harm, but the presence of care, restraint, and attention.

Over time, this understanding took on practical forms. Almost thirty years ago, I adopted a vegan way of life, not as an act of self-denial, but as an expression of solidarity with other living beings. I began to resist the logic of endless consumption—buying secondhand clothing rather than new, avoiding single-use plastics when possible, and learning to live with less rather than always wanting more. These choices extended into my political commitments as well, shaping a principled opposition to military aggression, police violence, and systems that normalize harm in the name of security or convenience.

Somewhat paradoxically, these acts of restraint made my life feel more expansive. The less I organized my days around consumption, domination, or fear, the more peaceful and focused I became. Living with fewer contradictions between my values and my actions brought a sense of coherence and happiness I had not known before. Nonviolence did not diminish my life; it clarified it. It gave me the emotional steadiness and moral confidence to pursue my studies, my teaching, and my work with greater purpose and calm.

After nearly thirty years, I remain Gandhian at my core. I believe nonviolence is not a fixed achievement or a moral badge, but a practice—one we revisit daily in our thoughts, our words, our habits, and our desires. Wherever traces of violence still linger within us, the invitation is not self-condemnation, but curiosity and growth. Ahiṃsā, I have learned, is not perfection. It is a direction. And even small steps taken in that direction—what we eat, what we buy, how we speak, what we tolerate—have the power to reshape not only our own lives, but the moral atmosphere we share with others.