Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature

Author(s): Vasantkumar Bhatt, Jitendra B Shah, Dinanath Sharma
Publisher: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi Ahmedabad

Page 129

104
Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature
TL
maximizing of positive karma (punya). In particular, the layman vows to support the mendicants through lavish gifting (dāna), which "is regarded not only as a means of acquiring merit which will lead to a better rebirth...but also as a way of emphasizing the part which the individual is playing in the community, whereby the religious and economic standing of the community is strengthened.” (Studies of the contemporary practice of däna are found in Cort 1999b, Laidlaw forthcoming, Vallely 1999, and Zydenbos 1999; Hibbets 1999 provides a good study of medieval texts on dāna; Findly [forthcoming] investigates women's religious gifting; Cort 2001 looks at the intersection of dāna and karma; and Granoff 1998a looks at karma in the contexts of devotion and the curing of bodily ailments.)
The second section of TAOL consists of three detailed studies of specific Jain communities in Rajasthan. Christine M. Cottam Ellis and J. Howard M. Jones conducted fieldwork among merchants in Rajasthan. The wealth of data they add to the volume underscores the importance of scholars of Jainism remembering that in Western India the Jains for many century have been primarily merchants, Marwari baniyās and Gujarati vāniyās; research on the Jains that ignores this central economic element presents us with a rather onesided portrait. (Babb 1998a and 2001 has also studied Jain merchant castes in the context of a larger study of the origin myths of merchant castes.) Cottam Ellis studies the merchants in a small town near Jaipur, in which the merchants were both Vaisnav and Jain, and the Jains primarily Digambar. Jones studied the merchants of a much smaller town in south Rajasthan, in which the merchants were all svetāmbar Mürtipūjak Jains. Not surprisingly, Cottam Ellis finds that the category “Jain” is not sufficient to define the merchants she studied, while Jones finds that it is a sufficient category. Neither Cottam Ellis nor Jones, however, fully addresses the interplay of economic and religious ideologies, and we still need a fuller exploration into this central nexus by a scholar much more attuned to religious distinctions than either Cottam Ellis or Jones. This was to have been the subject of the dissertation of the late Thomas Zwicker; his 198485 fieldwork notes in the archives of the University of Pennsylvania Museum are a valuable resource for anyone interested in pursuing the issue. The third article in this section is a survey of N. K. Singhi of the Tapā Gacch Mürtipujak Jain community in Sirohi, in southern Rajasthan. While there is much of value in Singhi's article, it is marred by sloppy transliterations, and will be of use primarily in the context of other, better, ethnographies.