Jainism in a Global Perspective - Collection of Jain papers of 1993 Parliament of World Religions, Chicago

SR No.: 014010
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Sagarmal Jain, Shreeprakash Pandey
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith
Publication Year: 1998
Total Pages: 402
Language: English
Classification: Seminar & Articles
File Size: 23 MB

Page 79

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Jainism in a Global Perspective
Jainism and made their way thence into Hinduism and general Indian life. Jaina thought influenced his family, his education. Jaina support was with him throughout and contributed wholeheartedly to his achievement. Srimad Rājcandra, a Jaina, was his constant adviser and mentor, but the Jaina do not make any proprietary claims, their purpose is that humanity live the good life not to claim anything. Thus, to say the American Civil Rights and Anti-War movements owe a great deal through Mahatma Gandhi to Jainism is valuable for our American Education, but the Jainas are not prove to say such things for themselves. But one wonders how much else there is which we will never be able to pin down. For example, Mahatma Gandhi's spinning wheel is a monument to an appropriate technology movement which is sometimes internationally traced in part to the work of the Stevenson family in Gujarat. But if we scrutinize the sources of the Stevenson's thinking we find they were deeply influenced by the Jainas amongst whom they lived and studied. As one struggles with old Jaina works on Mathematics, one wonders and the brain reels and begins to ask if it were not they who first thought of India's greatest gift to "Western" science the concept of myriads of numbers based on the symbol for nothing! Jainism is an independent self-determining comprehensive system of civilization of high antiquity and attainment, to be compared in its own right with the Chinese, Islamic or Jewish achievements. Its intrinsic selfeffacement should the more excite one's admiration, study and curiosity.
The British and American newspapers which I have tried to follow for half a century have done little to inform us about developments among Jainas. The same can be said in due course of cinema and television. This is not surprising since the general western media coverage of India is obsessed with its billions of people and "newsworthy" items like riots, bombs and curious customs. So we hear repetitions of the chestnut of immensely rich merchants hiring someone to sleep in their beds to keep the bugs alive and of course the bird hospital. That Jainas who had lived there since time began had to leave Pakistan in 1947 and start a new life, that Jainas tried to impart distinctive features to politics, industry, economics and the law in the New India, or that a self-conscious, self-supporting allIndia community emerged, would hardly get known. The lively academic give-and-take between scholars fared better but one feels that somehow the west continued until towards the end of this last hundred years to miss the