________________
If one looks at Google, Amazon.com and other internet search engines, one will find hardly one thousand books on Jainism as opposed to probably a million on Buddhism. If this is the case, how will people know about Jainism?
What some authors (especially from the West) write about Jainism, the viewpoints are distorted, wrong, and sometimes just slanderous. Once this happens and it happens every day -then the misperception is repeated and perpetuated and this is what people come to believe.
The general perception is that Jains live an unreachable life of other-worldliness, practice self-mortification, and do not contribute much to the welfare of the society. As a result, Jainism is not relevant in today's environment.
When one looks at the Jain literature today, most of it deals with the lifestyles of sadhus and kings but very little is said of the householders. So the perception grows that Jainism is only about other-worldliness. The further pity is that one will find only a few books about ahimsa and its practice within the community.
Dr. Michael Tobias produced a one-hour long video on ahimsa, and also wrote a book entitled Life Force of Jainism, in which he deals with the practice of ahimsa. Jains in general have shied away from such projects.
Prof. Jeffrey Long at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, who has been teaching world religions for a long time, observed that only a very few of his graduate or undergraduate students were actually interested in the study of Jainism. Prof. Long discovered that most of the students he encountered were turned off by Jainism because it seems unrelated to the real world, and it generally teaches only about other-worldliness.
Similarly, in a graduate class of world religions at the University of Hawaii, Prof. Cromwell Crawford asked his students what they knew about Jainism. The responses he got included, “Jains are those who make the biggest nudist colony in the world." Another response was "Jains are those who wrap themselves
An Ahimsa Crisis: You Decide
298
