Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature

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

Page 142

Recent Fieldwork Studies of the Contemporary Jains
117
to elucidate aspects of the Jain understanding of the world within a broader South Asian framework.
Humphrey and Laidlaw observe that many scholars have mistakenly assumed that "ritual is essentially communicative and expressive." They say that since "rituals are good things to do fieldwork on” due to the amount of information one can gain concerning cosmology, beliefs, and social structures, many scholars have assumed that the "purpose" of the ritual is precisely to communicate such ideas. They insist that the communication of such information is at best an incidental effect of ritual, not its primary purpose. But this is not to gainsay the importance of studying the information communicated if one's goal is that of Babb, "a consideration of a specific Jain tradition on its own terms," instead of Humphrey and Laidlaw's one of theorizing about ritual per se. Further, as Babb argues, "rituals actually occur within a cultural minimileau, a cultural domain associated specifically with rituals.” He characterizes this "ritual culture" as "an internally coherent body of skills, kinetic habits (such as patterned physical gestures expressive of deference), conventions, expectations, procedures, and sanctioned interpretations of the meaning of ritual acts. It is, one might say, an entire symbolic and behavioral medium within which ritual acts are invested with cognitive, affective, and even motor 'sense'." We thus see in Babb's careful interpretation of Jain rituals a very different understanding of the connection between ritual action and meaning than we find in Humphrey and Laidlaw's book.
At the heart of Babb's book is the same tension investigated in Laidlaw's Riches and Renunciation and my own Jains in the World : that between the ascetic and renunciatory values on the one hand, and worldly values on the other. He sees this tension as resulting from the problem faced by the Jains of how to weave a soteriology that emphasizes renunciation of the world into a way of life, which by definition involves the person in the world. Babb explores how this tension is expressed ritually in the regular eightfold pūjā, and in several of the longer, more elaborate mahāpūjās Jains perform on a frequent basis on special occasions, for, as he rightly observes, "rites of worship define one of the principal venues within which lay Jains of the image-worshipping groups actually come into contact with their religion.” Babb's approach benefits particularly from the careful attention he pays to the "texts" of these rituals, which, since they are widely found in the dog-eared hymnals found in every Jain temple and most every