How Jains Know What They Know A Lay Jain Curriculum

Author(s): John E Cort
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How Jains Know What They know : A Lay Jain Curriculum
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of these texts except for the Navasmaranas. Nonetheless, one will find copies of some of these texts in a large number of Jain households, and these are the texts to which a Jain interested in learning more about the intellectua foundations of his or her religious tradition would turn. With the exception of the Tattvārthasūtra, this curriculum contains none of the scriptural canon of "original" Jain texts with which Jainologists usually begin their explications of Jainism. But, as Kendall Folkert (1993 : 35-94) so clearly demonstrated, the scholarly predilection to focus exclusively upon "original” texts when studying a religious tradition itself betrays one of the origins of the academic study of religion in Protestant Biblical Studies, a tendency inherited by many scholars who themselves are not Protestant Christians'l. But it is not these original texts to which Jains turn when they want to learn about their own tradition, and so it behooves scholars to pay attention more to what Jains might actually read if they want to understand how Jains know what they know.
Annotations :
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Kendall W. Folkert, through whom I was
first introduced to Muni Jambūvijayji. 1. See Folkert 1993: 41-94, especially 91-94.
2. Information on the Smaraņa texts is derived from a variety of popular sources, in
particular the introductions found in Navāb and the unattributed 1972 Ahmedabad edition. Traditional dates and attributions of authorship for several of these hymns are clearly improbable. My discussion reflects a Jain self-understanding of the history of these texts and authors, what I have elsewhere (Cort 1995) called a "localized
history", not the voice of text-critical historicist scholarship. 3. Another tradition says he was a contemporary of Neminātha. (His real date seems
c. late 5th early 6th cent. A. D.)*
4. For introductions to these topics, see Cort forthcoming-a, Dundas 1998, and Jain
1997. 5. The dynamic tension and interplay between the ideology of the path to liberation
(moksamárga) and the religious value of wellbeing is the subject of Cort forthcoming
-b. * See Dhaky, “The Date of Ajita-śānti-stava," in which