Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature

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

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Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature
participants to be indeterminate or ambiguous in a postmodernist sense. The authors seem to assume that an action can have meaning only if all people perform it the same way and with the same intentions at all times. This is a highly debatable supposition. I am uncomfortable at the ease with which the authors conclude that because a multiplicity of meanings is attributed to a ritual the ritual is therefore meaningless. The logic behind the equation that a surplus of meaning equals an absence of meaning is not transparently obvious to me.
At bottom, the question the authors are addressing is not one of understanding the Jain eightfold pūjā, and perhaps not even one of understanding ritual in general, as much as it is the basic philosophical and theological question, "what is meaning ?” In answering this question, the authors state their position based upon their own a priori assumptions, which in this case happen to be a blend of postmodernist ontology, Euro-Amer cognitive psychology, linguistic anthropology, and contemporary We philosophy of mind. In such a worldview, meaning is at best contingent and contested, absolute certainty about anything is a chimera, and the best one can strive for is a relative adequacy of representation within a universe of endlesslyshifting signifiers. The authors implicitly insist that such an understan the world-which I have painted in an overly black-and-white fashion, and one with which I am not unsympathetic-should be applied to an understanding of Jain ritual. But such an application can be done only by displacing Jain understandings of their own ritual. In other words, the authors are engaged in a theological and philosophical debate with the Jain tradition itself over the "meaning of meaning."
While there is much in Archetypal Actions of Ritual that is insightful, and I for one will never think and write about ritual either in general or in its Jain forms as I did before reading the book, there is obviously much with which I disagree. Much of this may be a matter of personal predilection-the authors are interested in advancing a point of abstract theory, whereas I tend to be more interested in coming to a better understaning of the Jain tradition itself. The latter approach underlies Lawrence Babb's 1996 book on the Jains. Absent Lord starts at much the same place as Archetypal Actions, with the eightfold pūjā of the Khartar Gacch Mūrtipūjak Jains of Jaipur. But whereas Humphrey and Laidlaw then go in the direction of general theory, Babb uses similar material