Building a Safety Culture in U.S. Railroads

Building a Safety Culture in U.S. Railroads: 

What Barriers Prevent Establishing Effective Safety Cultures? 

Keith Hamilton

October 7, 2008

Introduction

This research study was conducted in 2008 on a large U.S. railroad with a long history of developing and implementing effective safety programs. It is intended for anyone who is interested in effective safety programs in the U.S. railroad industry. Historically, the railroad approach to safety has been a top-down approach that has emphasized a high level of regulation and discipline that has resulted in low-levels of trust between management and employees. The employees are mostly unionized, and the railroad industry itself is highly regulated. Many of the railroads current safety practices are mandated by federal regulations. While federal supervision has resulted in greater accountability it has also made implementing change more cumbersome.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) reports that employee on-duty deaths decreased from 27 in 1998 to 17 in 2007 and overall employee personal injuries saw similar improvement from 8227 in 1998 to 5024 in 2007. However, employee fatalities actually increased to 17 in 2007 from 16 in 2006 and overall employee injuries also increased to 5024 in 2007 from 4952 in 2006 (FRA, 2008). The increase in overall injuries is the first increase in employee on-duty injuries in the railroad industry during this same ten-year period. In addition, as a result of increased concern about terrorism and transportation of hazardous materials there is greater public awareness about railroad safety. Research into organizational behavior and industry best safety practices indicate that the best safety results are achieved through voluntary commitment and not compliance based programs. This paper examines railroad employees' attitudes toward safety to explore what barriers exist that could inhibit voluntary commitment on the part of railroad employees to effective safety programs.

Safety Culture

Reason maintains there are three elements involved in recurrent accidents (1998, p 300 - 301):

1. Universals. These are the hazards that are always present in a given work environment. 

2. Local traps. These are characteristics unique to a local work environment. 

3. Drivers. These are the motivating factors that contribute to a person actually being 'trapped' by the universal and local hazards. 

The mere existence of hazards is not sufficient to result in accidents and injuries. There must also be a driving force. In organizations the safety culture is seen as the driving force that contributes to a person falling prey to these hazards. 

In general, culture is defined as a set of values manifested by common practices, rules and behaviors within an organization. There is much discussion about how culture should be understood within an organization and how many different kinds of cultures exist within an organization. For our purposes we are concerned only with safety cultures, but it is important to note that within any organization safety cultures vary by location and work-group. A common misconception is that everyone within an organization conceptualizes safety in the same manner. Previous research has confirmed that cultures differ within an organization amongst different work groups (Harvey, Erdos, Bolam, Cox, Kennedy, & Gregory, 2002, p. 19). Thus, when we think of a corporate safety culture we are really referring to the sum total of all the different safety cultures within that organization. The International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) describes two major components of safety culture: "(a) the framework determined by organizational policy and by managerial action; and (b) the response of individuals in working within and benefiting by the framework, and suggest that success depends on commitment and competence, provided in the policy and managerial context and by individuals themselves" (Harvey, et al. 2002, p. 19-20). 

Reason proposed that an effective safety culture consists of three essential components; a just culture, a reporting culture, and a learning culture (Burns, Mearns, & McGeorge, 2006, p. 1139). Reason concluded it is possible that each of these subcultures can be intentionally engineered by organizations. The basic building block in building a safety culture is trust. Employees must be willing to trust management enough to share information about their behavior and the behavior of their fellow employees without fear of reprisal or reprimand. This level of trust is essential to building a reporting culture that is abasic requirement for a learning culture to exist. A learning culture exists when the information gathered is analyzed and intelligent, and relevant feedback is rapidly deployed throughout the organization. As this information flow is developed, an informed culture develops and a safety culture begins to emerge. An informed culture is one in which people, at all levels, understand the risks involved and know how to mitigate them.  To foster this environment an organization must be willing to address its' just culture. Reason said, "An effective reporting system depends, crucially, upon how an organization handles blame and punishment" (Reason, 1998, p. 302). Organizations must be willing to align their discipline systems with the goal of creating a safety culture. There are a couple of significant ways that should be explored. One is peer review. And, secondly, one must determine whether an employee's behavior is reasonable given the safety culture that exists in their work environment. If a reasonable employee would normally have done the same behavior, then the problem cannot accurately be attributed to only individual behavior. 

Trust

To build a safety culture it is necessary to understand what trust is and how to build and maintain trust in an organization. Trust in the context of building a safety culture is widely seen as a psychological state where one is willing to be vulnerable to another based upon positive expectations of their intentions or behavior (Burns, Mearns, & McGeorge, 2006, p. 1140). Many studies have been done on trust that indicates trust and distrust are not separate entities, nor are they opposites. Instead trust and mistrust coexist and are dynamic and both are necessary and beneficial to building a safety culture. For instance, one should have a healthy mistrust that
permits one to question instructions that jeopardize their own safety. Blind trust is more dangerous than little or no trust.

Research indicates that trust operates both explicitly and implicitly (Burns et al. 2006, p. 1141). Implicit trust operates intuitively without one consciously being aware of it, while explicit trust operates on the surface and is based on well-thought out and conscious deliberations. Organizations with safety cultures have fewer negative safety outcomes and more positive responses on both explicit and implicit measures of trust, and that they should be expressed for all members of an organizational hierarchy (Burns et al. 2006, p. 1147). 

In a study of a UK gas plant researchers found that relationships between employees are characterized by both high levels of trust and higher levels of distrust, while employee relationships with management exhibited lower levels of trust and distrust (Burns et al. 2006, p. 1148). This suggests that employee relationships with each other are characterized by both positive and negative experiences while employee relationships with management are characterized by more limited interactions and experiences. The most optimal condition for a safety culture is to have both higher scores for trust and lower scores for distrust. For management this means that there must be greater interaction between management and employees and that more of those experiences must be positive. Some behaviors that are helpful in building a more trusting environment are rapid responses to safety concerns, meaningful discussions with employees about safety and work practices, and by treating employees fairly and consistently when incidents do occur which reduce their feelings of mistrust. Additional research, has indicated that major safety incidents are influenced by attitudes toward management, while less serious events are influenced by attitudes toward co-workers (Conchie, & Donald, & Taylor, 2006, p. 1102). This highlights the need for organizations to build trust throughout all levels of an organization.

Another type of trust study focused on the role of trust in the post-privatized UK railway industry and showed the existence of a "rule-based" trust (Jeffcott et al. as cited in Conchie et al. 2006, p. 1100). In this environment employees are found capable of working together in high risk work environments, but its taken-for-granted nature has the potential to reduce personal responsibility for safety. This produces over confidence in others' safety, and inhibits the development of an informed culture where employees remain cautious about the risks in their work environment.

Safety Leadership

Being an effective safety leader requires something different than what is required to be a great leader. Great safety leaders generally have a strong emotional commitment to make a difference and require a great deal of empathy and compassion. Being a great safety leader is not just about what a person does, but is very much about who a person is. The interior character of the individual is central to the success of a great safety leader. The development of this kind of leadership requires the teaching and coaching of how to leverage natural strengths while compensating for one's shortcomings. In this context an organization's success in developing a safety culture is contingent on developing great safety leaders.

Another kind of great safety leader is often referred to as a transformational leader. Transformational leaders are often seen as those who can motivate subordinates to achieve key organizational goals. Transformational leaders inspire people by utilizing intellectual stimulation and inspirational motivation. Intellectual stimulation encourages employees to think about safety in new ways. Inspirational leadership encourages employees to look beyond their own self-interest to the best interests of the group. This requires that transformational leaders think beyond their own self-interests and to consider the best interest of the employees. In a study of swimming pool supervisors and their swim instructors results substantiated previous research indicating that there is a positive relationship between safety-specific transformational leadership and safety compliance and participation (Sivanathan, Turner, & Barling, 2005). These results suggest that the message that the managers send to their employees can have significant impacts and that providing transformational leadership training is another viable intervention to improving workplace safety. 

Methodology

I conducted a random survey of railroad employees who all worked within one single work location on a large U.S. railroad in September of 2008. There were 30 surveys issued in person by a management trainee who had limited familiarity with the workforce. Of the 30 surveys issued, 27 were fully completed, 2 were partially completed, and one was not filled out at all. The 3 surveys that were not fully completed were excluded from the survey results. The survey used a 4-response force-choice Likert survey that asked respondents to reply to 20 statements that utilized a summated scale to score responses. The scoring system utilized rated the highest positive response as a 54 while the lower the number indicated a more negative response. Of the 27 counted surveys, 20 were issued to transportation department employees while 7 were issued to mechanical department employees. This skewed the results toward transportation department employees. There were only 3 responses from road employees that limited the response from this work group. About one-half the responses came from employees working variable work schedules while most of the rest came from employees who worked the daylight shift. This unintentionally limited the responses from second and third shift employees. The age and experience demographics were well represented. The major shortcoming of the survey is that it is too limited in its geographical and functional representations. The survey needs more responses from road employees and employees from the locomotive and engineering departments. It also needs to include employees from more than one work location and needs more representation from all three shifts.

Findings

The results from the surveys indicated that the employees surveyed were motivated to work safely and that they considered themselves trustworthy to work safely. Employees were less confident about their co-workers concern for safety, or trustworthiness than their own. The survey results gave management almost as high a score as their co-workers when it came to concern for safety in general as well as concern for their personal safety. Employees were not as confident that management could be relied on to issue rules that promoted safe work activity. So while employees in general viewed management's intentions as good they did not see their results as positively as their intentions. 

The primary research indicated that while employees generally understood hat manager’s job assessments were linked with their safety results, it also indicated that employees were not particularly concerned how their managers were evaluated. In fact, the primary research showed that employees responded most negatively to the following two statements about employee relationships with their personal managers, “ I am proud of my relationship with my manager,” and, “I care how my manager is evaluated.” Paradoxically, while employee’s responses demonstrated that they were not very concerned about their manager, the survey results showed that the employees thought that their managers were concerned about them.

The survey also measured how often employees had contact with management. It asked employees to respond how many times they had a contact with any railroad manager and how often they had contact with their personal manager. When all respondents were considered they estimated their contact with management to be greater than the employee group who had responded negatively about their relationships with their personal managers. This would suggest that employees with more negative attitudes toward their managers actually have less
contact with their managers, or estimated the amount of contact with their manager to be less that it actually was. At any rate there is a relationship between the amount of contact an employee estimated they had with management and their attitudes toward their manger.

Conclusion

The scope of the primary research was to measure employee's attitudes in the railroad industry toward safety and evaluate how employees felt about management's commitment to safety. Research has consistently indicated the important role that management plays in
implementation of effective safety programs. Historically the railroad industry has viewed management's responsibilities as one of regulator and rules enforcer. The regulatory agencies responsible for overseeing the railroads have reinforced this management style with
their own regulatory and enforcement oversight style. This style of management often results in strained employee relationships. It can result in rule-based safety compliance, but it is not likely to stimulate voluntary commitment. The challenge for the railroad industry is to implement safety programs that are based on more recent organizational behavior research that indicates employees want to be involved in the safety process when they feel respected and
listened to. Most importantly employees need to feel that they will be treated fairly and justly. This requires a new approach by railroad management. It requires a participatory approach that recognizes all employees have a stake in safety and encourages participation by all employees. The best safety programs involve the greatest number of participants.

I suggest that the railroads first address their "just" culture. The discipline systems must move away from blame and punishment to learning and encouragement. Research indicates that trust is absolutely essential in order to have a self reporting system that encourages a learning culture that is essential for a safety culture to exist. To develop this kind of trust requires more than policy changes. It requires a change in the way managers interact with employees. In turn, this requires a change in how upper management interacts with middle management, and how middle management interacts with front-line managers and supervisors. Trust must exist through all levels of an organization.

Organizational behavior research highlights the important role that management plays in safety. It starts with the managers who are closest to the employees. This survey indicates that employees' attitude about their personal managers is an area in need of improvement. This suggests that managers need to be better developed to be "safety leaders." Research has shown that being an effective safety leader is not only about what a manager does but also about what kind of person a manager is. This suggests that "safety leaders" are caring people. Geller suggests caring employees exhibit a positive self - esteem, a sense of belonging, and empowerment (Watson, 2005, p. 307). It is a daunting challenge, but there are interventions that can aid in this development. One possible intervention is to develop management-training programs that afford managers more experience actually performing the tasks done by the employees they manage. This would equip managers to better understand the requirements of employees’ jobs. Another viable intervention would be to develop management-training programs that encourage promotion from within the ranks and afford an opportunity for those selected to promotion to receive college education while working. This would require flexible schedules, and college reimbursement programs, but just as importantly, it would require incentive programs that discouraged promoted employees from returning to their previous positions. Another viable intervention would be greater opportunities for managers to do service learning by participating in community service activities. This would benefit both the community and the company by helping to develop more effective safety leaders.

Recently railroads have made adjustments in their approach to employee safety, but they have not made the kind of change needed to generate trust. While audits and learning are important tools, the railroads still promote a testing culture that emphasizes finding and reporting employee failure. In order to improve trust between employees and managers there must be both greater interaction and more positive interaction. Employee relationships need to change from failure finding to coaching and teaching success. Instead of managers being held accountable for testing exceptions, measure the number of coaching sessions performed or the number of employees coached.

The railroads traditionally measure safety progress by improvement in injury and accident rates. While these kind of measurements are meaningful at the corporate level they fail to recognize and motivate those who work safely. A better measurement system focuses on positive safety achievements like measuring participation levels in safety programs, the number of employees trained, elimination of safety hazards, etc.

The railroads and the FRA have historically been too comfortable assigning responsibility for human caused incidents to only human failure while not sufficiently considering the contribution of the safety culture. If railroads are to continue to make the kind of improvement in safety that they have in the past decade, then their employees will have to be committed to those same goals. This will require voluntary commitment from the employees. This survey’s results show that overall the railroad employees reported positive attitudes towards safety, but it also indicates that there needs to be more progress made in how managers interact with employees. It is clear that employees who responded most negatively about their relationship with their managers also reported they had less contact with management. A simple management intervention would be to increase both the quantity and quality of employee contacts with their managers.

Figure 1: Employee response survey.

Higher scores indicate more positive responses, while lower scores indicate less positive
responses:

Table 1 Frequency of managerial contact by
employees:

References

Burns, C., Mearns, K., & McGeorge, P. (2006, October). Explicit and Implicit Trust
Within Safety Culture. Risk Analysis: An International Journal, 26(5), 1139-1150. Retrieved May 2, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

Conchie, S., Donald I., & Taylor P. (2006). Trust: Missing Piece(s) in the Safety Puzzle.Risk Analysis, 26(5), 1097-1104. Retrieved May 2, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

Cooper, M. (2006). Exploratory Analyses of the Effects of Managerial Support and Feedback Consequences of Behavioral Safety Maintenance. Journal of Organizational Behavioral Management, 26(3), 1-41. Retrieved April 26, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

Cox, S., Jones, B., & Collinson, D. (2006, October). Trust Relations in High-Reliability Organizations. Risk Analysis: An International Journal, 26(5), 1123-1138. Retrieved May 2, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

Federal Railroad Administration, Office of Safety Analysis. Ten Year Accident/ Incident Overview by Railroad, 1998 - 2007. Retrieved May 14, 2008 from http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/

Geller, S. (nd). How to Get More People Involved in Behavior-Based Safety: Selling an Effective Process. http://www.behavior.org/safety/geller.pdf. Retrieved May 10, 2008 from Google Search.

Harvey, J., Erdos, G., Bolam, H., Cox, M., Kennedy, J., & Gregory, D. (2002, January). An Analysis of Safety Culture Attitudes in a Highly Regulated Environment. Work & Stress, 16(1), 18-36. Retrieved May 2, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

Reason, J. (1998). Achieving a Safe Culture: Theory and Practice. Work & Stress, 12(3), 293-306. Retrieved May 3, 2008, from Google Scholar.

Sivanathan, N. Turner, N., & Barling, J. (2005, August). Effects of Transformational Leadership Training on Employee Safety Performance: A Quasi-Experiment Study. Academy of Management Proceedings, Retrieved April 29, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

Wallace, C., & Chen, G. (2006, September). A Multilevel Integration of Personality, Climate, Self-Regulation, and Performance. Personnel Psychology, 59(3), 529-557. Retrieved April 26, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

Watson, G., Scott, D., Bishop, J., & Turnbeaugh, T. (2005, Spring) Dimensions of Interpersonal Relationships and Safety in the Steel Industry. Journal of Business & Psychology, 19(3), 303-318. Retrieved May 2, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

What Need of Man has God?

Once I asked my teacher, Kalman the cabalist, the following question:  For what purpose did God create man?  I understand that man needs God.  But what need of man has God?  My teacher closed his eyes and a thousand wounds, petrified arteries traveled by terror-stricken truths, drew a tangled labyrinth on his forehead.  After a few minutes of contemplation, his lips formed a delicate, very distant smile.  "The Holy Books teach us," he said, "that if man were conscious of his power, he would lose his faith or his reason.  For man carries within him a role which transcends him.  God needs him to be ONE.  The Messiah, called to liberate man, can only be liberated by him.  We know that not only man and the universe will be freed, but also the one who established their laws and their relations.  It follows that man - who is nothing but a handful of earth - is capable of reuniting time and its source, and of giving back to God his own image." - Elie Wiesel

Bergson's Theory of Knowledge and Einstein's Theory of Relativity

From The Philosopher,Volume. II, 1924
Bergson's Theory of Knowledge and Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
By Professor Wildon Carr

EPITOME OF LECTURE given on November 7th, at the Lyceum Club
2000 - the Editor adds:
In this early paper from the Journal, delivered orally, as was the then fashion, Professor Wildon Carr offers an holistic account of life, the universe and everything...
The title of my lecture may suggest that I am going to undertake the ambitious task of , expounding two important and most complex theories in one short discourse. It is however one subject only which I have in mind, namely, the extraordinary revolution in the fundamental conceptions of philosophy and science which marks the first quarter of this twentieth century. I going to speak of Bergson's and Einstein's theories as the most striking illustrations of the new ideas which l can think of.
I recollect, when I was a lad, being very impressed by a sermon I heard by a well-known clergyman who professed a liberal form of religion which he called Theism. (Rev. C. Voysey). He closed an eloquent peroration by saying that there was one human science in which God and Man were on the same plane - this was mathematics. It was impossible even for God to think that twice two is four is untrue. In this he was expressing a fundamental conception which was formulated by Descartes at the beginning of modern philosophy, and which became firmly established as the basis of the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was dominated by the idea of the positivity of natural science The great philosopher of the latter part of that century, Herbert Spencer, expressed it in his doctrine of the Unknowable.
Science was a realm of clear positive knowledge; in scientific facts, and more especially still in mathematical principles, the human mind touched the absolute; but surrounding this realm was a murky, obscure, indefinite region in which the human mind could find no sure foothold. This region was not only unknown, but unknowable, because when we tried to apply principles within it we inevitably fell into contradiction.
He named this realm the "unknowable" and suggested that we might be reverent towards it as it contained the object of religious belief. This position was generally accepted by all the great scientific leaders and researchers of the last generation. Today, there is the most complete change.
We might almost say that men of science today are more confident that they know the conditions of that realm which Spencer called the unknowable than they are that they have any absolute knowledge of those near at hand facts which are the subject of the sciences.
The change in the modern outlook has come along two distinct and different lines, because there are two factors in knowledge. These are first the activity of the mind in knowing, and second, the activity of the world in revealing itself . To illustrate the change which has these two lines I have chosen a theory of Bergson and a theory of Einstein. They are quite independent and unconnected, but together they show two aspects of the change, the one its subjective, the other its objective aspect.
Bergson has told us that he was led to doubt the absolute nature of the human intellect by the scientific observations of the great French entomologist, J. H. Fabre. These observations led to the conclusion that the form of mentality in insects was an entirely different mode of consciousness to that which we find in ourselves. What seemed to be clear, moreover, was that the mode of consciousness which was active in insects was peculiarly suited to the needs of their existence and to the kind of actions they were required to perform and to the range of their activity.
It appeared to Bergson that the intellect of higher animals and of us human beings might in like manner be a mode of consciousness which was a product of evolution and designed for our special needs. This led to his theory of knowledge. The intellect, he held is not designed for speculation but for action, and for speculation only in so far as it serves action. We do not contemplate reality. Our life consists in a readiness for action, and our attitude is one of forward-looking to the actions which we are preparing. The intellect is the form of mentality which serves us in our life activity. It does not reveal things as they are, but it frames the actions which serve us in our life activity. It frames the changing, stream of existence, making it assume the staid forms of spatial things. It geometrizes space and it spatializes time.
Let us now turn to the other aspect of the revolution, its objective side. The world as Newton conceived it: a structureless, infinite space and a time flowing at rate, seemed to philosophers and men of science of the last century to involve no hypothesis but to be a simple acceptance of fact at its clear face-value. When Newton discovered the law of gravitation, and could express it in a formula which applied universally, it appeared as though the secure foundations of physical science were laid on an objective basis. There was, however, a very troublesome inconsistency in the conception. The law of gravitation postulated universal attraction, and if the universe really is infinite in space and time, how are we to account for the fact that masses of matter are distributed throughout it. In infinite time, the attractive force must have brought all into one central mass. It would be impossible in this lecture to indicate the various observations which have thrown doubt on Newton's universe of infinite space and time and have led finally to its rejection. Einstein has now given to science an entirely new concept of the universe, the concept of a universe which is finite and yet unbounded. I may enable you to get a rough picture of the idea by asking you to imagine yourselves living in a sphere in which you can move freely but in which every movement towards the circumference involves a flattening of your proportions with its limit in complete flatness at the circumference in such a universe space would not be structureless, for your shape would depend on your postion.
If we take the course of science generally we see that it has been helped forward in its progress by invention. It was the telescope which enabled Galileo to demonstrate the truth of the Copernican theory and led to the momentous discovery that light ins not instantaneous, but has a definite interval of time in its propagation. It was the microscope which revealed the new worlds within worlds. But both these instruments seemed to confirm the view that science was confined to a realm of clear knowledge with undefined boundaries. In the later half of last century a new instrument was invented, the spectroscopes, which has not only extend our knowledge of nature but revolutionised it. Unlike the telescope and the microscope, which continue our unaided observation, the spectroscope takes us as it were at a bound to the limits of the universe an shows us how is its constituted. the new electric theory of matter and the secret of atomic structure is what it has revealed.
But the most revolutionary discovery of modern science concerns the principle of discovery itself. We are observers of nature, but the nature we observe consists of systems moving relatively to one another. There is no system or place in a system which is absolute, so that by reference to it we may determine absolutely the velocity of a movement. Yet to measure the movement of any system we must adopt a standpoint. This is Einstein's principle of relativity. Every observer of nature measuring phenomena takes a frame of reference and whatever frame he chooses it must be for him a system at rest. Thus just as we saw in Bergson's theory when we considered the subjective factor, or mind, or intellect, so in Einstein's theory when we consider the objective factor, the world, or universe, we have nothing absolute to refer to.
In the beginning of philosophy, Descartes conceived nature as a system. Creation, he said, was the imparting of movement to extension, and movement must produce a vortex system and this was the world. Newton rejected this as a hypothesis and accepted space and time as the background of movement, the velocity of which might be infinite. Einstein has brought us back to concept of the nature as a system, and Bergson has given us the concept of our intellect as itself a product of creative evolution. On each side, mind and nature, the idea of the absolute - absolute knowledge of absolute reality - has given place to the principle of relativity.

US is Top Seller of Arms to the Developing World

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — "The United States maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world in 2006, followed by Russia and Britain, according to a Congressional study to be released Monday. Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers.

The global arms market is highly competitive, with manufacturing nations seeking both to increase profits and to expand political influence through weapons sales to developing nations, which reached nearly $28.8 billion in 2006."

Pakistan was a major recipient of American arms sales in 2006, including the $1.4 billion purchase of 36 new F-16C/D fighter aircraft and $640 million in missiles and bombs. The deal included a package for $890 million in upgrades for Pakistan’s older versions of the F-16.
At the same time, the State Department’s own survey of global human rights in 2006 noted a variety of shortcomings in Pakistan’s record on human rights and democratization.
But the Bush administration has argued that it is important to maintain the support of a nuclear-armed Pakistan in the broader counterterrorism fight, in particular as Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders regroup in the rugged North-West Frontier Province along the Afghan border."

- NY Times.

Meaning of Ahimsa by Sri Swami Sivananda

"Ahimsa or non-injury, of course, implies non-killing. But, non-injury is not merely non-killing. In its comprehensive meaning, Ahimsa or non-injury means entire abstinence from causing any pain or harm whatsoever to any living creature, either by thought, word, or deed. Non-injury requires a harmless mind, mouth, and hand. Ahimsa is not mere negative non-injury. It is positive, cosmic love. It is the development of a mental attitude in which hatred is replaced by love. Ahimsa is true sacrifice. Ahimsa is forgiveness. Ahimsa is Sakti (power). Ahimsa is true strength.

There is one religion - the religion of love, of peace. There is one message, the message of Ahimsa. Ahimsa is a supreme duty of man.

The power of Ahimsa is greater than the power of the intellect. It is easy to develop the intellect, but it is difficult to purify and develop the heart. The practice of Ahimsa develops the heart in a wonderful manner. He who practices Ahimsa develops strong will-power. In his presence, enmity ceases. In his presence, cobra and frog, cow and tiger, cat and rat, wolf and lamb, will all live together in terms of intimate friendship.

Ahimsa is never a policy. It is a sublime virtue. It is the fundamental quality of seekers after Truth. No Self-realization is possible without Ahimsa. Whoever wishes to realize the Truth must practice Ahimsa. There is a hidden power in Ahimsa which protects its practitioners. The invisible hand of God gives protection. There is no fear. What can pistols and swords do ?"

Ahimsa = non-violence, by Gandhi

"Literally speaking, ahimsa means non-violence. But to me it has much higher, infinitely higher meaning. It means that you may not offend anybody; you may not harbor uncharitable thought, even in connection with those you consider your enemies. To one who follows this doctrine, there are no enemies. A man who believes in the efficacy of this doctrine finds in the ultimate stage, when he is about to reach the goal, the whole world at his feet. If you express your love- Ahimsa-in such a manner that it impresses itself indelibly upon your so called enemy, he must return that love.

This doctrine tells us that we may guard the honor of those under our charge by delivering our own lives into the hands of the man who would commit the sacrilege. And that requires far greater courage than delivering of blows."

between us and you a great chasm is established

based on: Lk 16:19-31


The story of Lazarus is another parable told by Jesus to the Pharisees to indicate how wealth and power are to be used. In the modern era we have a difficult time reconciling Jesus’ profound concern for the poor with our own lives of comfort and wealth. Often we try to explain away the hard sayings of Jesus, and instead emphasize a Christianity that is based on what we believe and not the ways we demonstrate our concern for each other. I think that Jesus is challenging this logic today. He leaves no doubt about what his feelings are regarding the rich man. Luke’s gospel is filled with many of these references about the burden of being rich. I don’t think Jesus is telling us that being rich is evil, any more than being poor is virtuous. I think Jesus is challenging us to examine our values. What is it that we consider riches and wealth? This story only tells us that Lazarus was poor and that the rich man was rich. The rich man lived in comfort while Lazarus lived in the streets suffering. We don’t know anything more about the rich man other than he walked by Lazarus and the poor while he lived in comfort. I think this is the real point of this story: the rich man was unaffected by suffering and poverty. Jesus on the other hand is seen throughout Luke’s gospel as very affected by suffering and poverty. Earlier in Luke’s gospel Jesus tells the Pharisees that, "what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God." We see this being illustrated today in this parable. The real sin for the rich man is that he values material comfort more than he does concern for his fellow man. If we value comfort and status more than we do concern for the poor, then our values are not aligned with Jesus. In Luke’s gospel Jesus has a social agenda. He is not satisfied with just easing the suffering of the poor, but he is actually interested in changing the social structure of society that permits this poverty to go on. His desire is to create a new social order that is based on concern for the suffering and the poor. St. John Chrysostom says, "The rich man is a kind of steward of the money which is owed for distribution to the poor...For his own goods are not his own, but belong to his fellow servants." In other words, the rich man serves as society’s social welfare system. Jesus has entrusted us with fulfilling his vision for a new social order that is based on concern for the poor and the suffering. These are Jesus’ values. They must be ours too!

Jesus tells us that a great chasm exists between the rich and the poor. It is so great a chasm that one cannot cross from one to the other. The chasm is so great that is exists beyond this age and this time and continues to separate us beyond this life. Here we see the mercy of Jesus in action as he provides comfort to the poor and suffering, but where is the mercy of Jesus for those who are rich? Are we left to believe that Jesus has no mercy for those who are rich? While Jesus could be loving and comforting, we see that he is also capable of being harsh and condemning and especially when he challenges the social institutions that support continued suffering. We must recall that Jesus’ method of compassion is the cross. Jesus compassion is the denial of the self and the desires of the self. The great chasm that exists is between those who are concerned only with themselves, and those whose concern is for the poor and suffering. It is so great a chasm that it cannot be crossed. The only way over this great chasm is an interior change of heart that results in a change of focus away from ourselves toward those who are suffering and poor. If we cannot make this transformation in our own lives, then Jesus tells us, "between us and you a great chasm is established."