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Jainism in a Global Perspective
source for around seven decades. But it was published in a missionary series and had to have remarks coming from the author's "fundamentalistic" background.'Jainism did not have at itscenter a loving creator God willing to at one everything, ergo it had no heart. It reminds one of friendly advice on a certain fine internationally respected New England newspaper. "It makes wonderful sense as long as you do not read the religion section." This brilliant woman scholar who served with practical love through the hardships even of the great Gujarat famine of 1900, was prevented by her form of faith from seeing what her Master would have seen. Some Christian leaders like the main organizers of the Parliament had already in 1893 moved on from that position. Today "the main line Churches" have also to some extent moved on, but there are still powerful and wellorganized groups who can do much to delay understanding and cooperation. Much work of education remains to be done.
For the coming together of west and east, whatever Kipling may have meant in Gunga Din, both west and east had to do some things. The west needed a wholesale change of attitude. The average American, Britisher, or European had fundamentally to question the adequacy and fulfillment of western ways of life and thought. Actually, the millennial and eschatological scenario in our background suggests things are not only inadequate but hopeless without outside help. The city, the family, sexs and gender relations, health and medical arrangements, the city, political, scientific and economic paradigms and structures are falling apart and we seem hellbent on destroying ourselves in pollution and in a dying ecology we have sorely wounded. All our traditions, including our religions, need a vigorous infusion of new thought and structure if we are going to survive.
From three decades ago and earlier we can trace a trail of westerners going to India and taking on the life of local devotees in an Indian religious community and then either writing books or coming back and starting Indic-type communities in the west. The Beatles and the Rishikesh schools took the limelight but there are notable other instances including some in the Jaina tradition. For example, a French Catholic woman who is most self-effacing has immersed herself for years in the life of the Jaina women's renunciant orders. Her book Laa Voie Jaina indicates what she was looking for and what she found--the world's most senior women's order in which
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