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ARHAT VACANA
Kundakunda Jñanapitha, Indore
Vol. 12, No. 2, July 2000, 47-54
RIGHTFUL EXPOSITION OF JAINISM
IN THE WEST
N. L. Jain
Preliminary Remarks
I have utilised the occasion of presentation of my paper on 'The Concept of Zero in Jaina Texts' at the IVth International Conference of Mathematics, Maebashi, Japan to visit the U.S. and Canada. Many learned Jaina saints, Bhattarakas and scholars have been going to west for many years promoting Jainism as a world religion through their lectures and practices. Many impressive narratives on these activities are published in Jaina papers here and abroad. My interest lay in learning the effect of these tours on western non-Jaina and scholarly world. Accordingly, I visited the religion or religious studies departments of many universities, their libraries and public libraries. I also met many faculty members of these departments. I learnt that there are numerous religious studies departments in universities abroad and also there are large number of students in them. Despite this, there was hardly any knowledge about Jainism and its literature among them. There was virtually no Jaina literature there (except in Austin.TX.). However, there are courses on World's Religions and we could find many text books on this subject written by competent teacher scholars. The students got the knowledge of Jainism through these books only. I read about 25 of these books written between 1889 and 1999 (Two of them are published in India). They describe Jainism in four to twenty four pages including some pictures of architectural importance. I was surprised to read contents about Jainism in them. I could feel that there are many wrong conceptions about it among most of the scholars and therefore students also. If such descriptions are read, the new generation will have negative opinion. (This does not mean that all the books have similar descriptions. Some books have good analytical descriptions like the OUP books of 1996 and 1997.) The reason for this could be that our literature has neither reached the authors nor the publishers. Also, whatever has reached them, it is either indirect or traditional which have led them to present it the way they have done it. Of course, this indicates the lop-sided studies of these scholars. I do not know whether any attempt has been made to remove thses types of conceptions. How, otherwise, the same would have been expressed even in the books of 1999. I also felt from all this that the western world remains immune to these yearly lectures and expositions
Director - Jaina Kendra, Rewa-486 001 (M.P.)
