Ahimsa

One curious thing about nonviolence is that, in most languages, there isn’t an active term for it: the concept exists only in opposition to the main one: violence.

Ahimsa, in Sanskrit, is a compound word: himsa, meaning “to cause harm,” and the prefix a, meaning “not.”

It seems like a small detail, but what if language is a thermometer of our priorities as a society?

“If we lived in a world where there was no word for war except non-peace, what kind of world would that be? It wouldn’t necessarily be a world without war, but one where war would be seen as something aberrant and insignificant.”