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Jainism in a Global Perspective
Most came as highly trained and needed professionals or entrepreneurs or men and women of means who could provide employment and create prosperity. The Jainas have come in peace and dwelt here in non-violence seeking to serve and prosper the life of the communities they have joined. Dr. Sulekh Jain, President of the Federation of Jaina Associations of North America which was founded in 1981 to coordinate and promote knowledge of and service by Jainism in this continent, in considering what the newspapers have said of the effect of the westerners' activities in the first thirtyiyears after Columbus' landing in Santa Domingo, he contrasted what had happened in Jaina history in the west during the thirty years just gone by." The serendipity of their coming is that at the time when we westerners realize we are desperately in need of help in our attitude to the divine, to science, to our fellow men and women, to life together in community, and in all forms of violence and poverty, to death, to the environment, here there has appeared among us a group whose long history proves they have ideas, answers and methods which will be of help.18 Given time and space it would not be difficult to expatiate usefully on each one of these items where Jaina thought and example could greatly assist us. Here four sideglances must suffice. Their contribution on ecology has been briefly noted already. On death, just as we are at last giving deeper attention to euthanasia, research is telling us to be aware of Jaina thought and action on this." On the divine, if I may judge from my students'essays, it is a great weight lifted off young shoulders if those who resent the "guilt trips" hung on them by the way in which God has been presented to them, learn of a concept of divinity which is not conveyed in terms of an angry God meeting out punishments. As to Religion and Science, Jainism can help put the sad tragi-comedy of what happened over Galileo and Darwin into its historical context of mistakes made by certain groups of Churchmen in a particular context. In the latter case for example, for what it is worth, if a jocular anecdote be permitted and if one can trust oral tradition, apparently an Oxford Union undergraduate debate did much to set the alternatives for man's descent as being either from the angels or from the apes.20
But to return to the Jainas, it is by no means inevitable either that they should continue their intellectual brilliance and contribution or that they
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