Food And Freedom

Author(s): Paul Dundas
Publisher: Paul Dundas

Page 27

Food and Freedom
187
to the surface the emotional hunger of the Jaina laity for an object of worship more gracious or glamorous than merely the austere figure of an exalted human teacher.180 The Digambara Jinasena's Adipuräna (9th century) shows a clear desire to assimilate the tirthankara (in this case Rsabha) and the Hindu gods and leaves no room for doubt that devotion directed towards him will bring about the desired rewards. 181 Although these rewards arguably involve the internal, spiritual transformation of the devotee, Jinasena. unmistakably conveys that the tirthankara is capable of bestowing grace.
The time is surely ripe to consider some vital questions about the Jaina religion: contemporary sectarian attitudes towards the tirthankara, the role of the deities of the Jaina pantheon in worship, the possibility of regional as well as sectarian variations in ritual and so on. Jinasena jeered that anybody who tried to demonstrate that the kevalin takes food was suffering from a disease brought about by delusion and would need a strong dose of ancient ghee to remedy it.182 It is to be hoped that Western students of South Asian religion can find a more palatable means of dispelling the deluding karma which has prevented them from giving Jainism the attention it deserves.
'I would like to thank the British Academy for awarding me a grant which enabled me to undertake much of the research for this paper and Professor Nagin Shah for granting me research facilities at the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad.
NOTES
1 R. Williams, Jaina Yoga: a survey of the medieval śrāvakācāras, London 1963. The Unversity of California's publication in 1979 of P. S. Jaini's The Jaina Path of Purification is greatly to be welcomed.
2 See, for example, A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India, London 1971, p. 295.
3 Published by the Oxford University Press 1915; reprinted in Delhi 1970. 4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, London 1973, p. 398. Happily, the situation seems to be changing. Caroline Humphrey of the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK, is studying image installation in Jaina temples; two postgraduate students working under Dr Humphrey's direction, Josephine Reynell and Marcus Banks, are studying respectively Jaina women in Jaipur and the Jaina communities in Jamnagar and Leicester; Michael Carrithers, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Durham, UK, is studying the Jaina community in Kolhapur and Thomas McCormick, Department of History, University of Michigan, USA is completing a doctoral dissertation on lay-monastic relations in Gujarat.
5 See Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, Delhi, 1980, pp. 79-80.
6 For this characterisation of southern religion see Friedhelm Hardy, Virahabhakti: The Early History of Krsna Devotion in South India, Oxford 1982, p. 169.