JAINA Convention 1993 07 Pittusburgh

Author(s): Federation of JAINA
Publisher: USA Federation of JAINA

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Sanskrit at John Hopkins in 1881. He became one of the leading scholars of Indology and its related philology. Somewhat late in his career he began his work in Jain Maharashtri and Jainology and did not publish in this subject till near his death. However, his Life and Stories of the Jaina Savior Parsavanatha is to this day well worth careful study.21
William Norman Brown (18921975) was born in Baltimore and studied mainly at John Hopkins. He taught at Jammu and studied at Varanasi. He became deeply interested in Indian art, made many Indian friends and kept up close links with India. His publications include works in Jain miniatures and manuscript illustrations.
Heinrich Zimmer, whose main career had been in Germany, gave courses of lectures at Columbia University in New York City in 1942 and 1943 on the Philosophies of India, naturally including Jain teachings. He died before they were finalised in writing for publication. They were edited and put through Press by Joseph Campbell who achieved national television fame as a mythologist. Jain mythology and philosophy came before the American general public both through Cambell's references to it on T.V and through Zimmer's Philosophies of India which appeared in the prestigious Bollingen Series as vol
ume XXVI.22 Although Jainism is unfortunately omitted in some of our main series and compendiums of and introductions to World Religions, Campbell gave excellent coverage to the important Jain teachings in his Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God (1962).
It is not American chauvinism which causes us to mention especially the work of Kendall W. Folkert, one of our most promising Jainologists, who was killed as a young man on field-work in a motor accident outside Ahmednagar. He asked many critical questions of his predecessors in the best "revisionist" style. He asks why scholars have so focused on canonising texts when Jains
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really do not have a narrow authoritative canon such as sixteenth and later century Europeans imagined Christians had. He questioned how any philologist sitting in Europe or America can think he understands what he is studying. One must meet the people, see the monuments, not only the inscriptions, attend the ceremonies, exegete the rituals.2 His article in the Penguin Handbook of Living Religions is one of the best Encyclopedia articles of its size ever written, 24
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World-wide Studies in Jainism 1914-1985
Inevitably the age of Germanic leadership which started in the 1880's was brought to weakening by World War I and then by Hitler's regime of 1933 to 1945. It has partially recovered as has also the strong accompaniment given by the French. Indian work especially by the great Oriental and Jain Institutes on the texts remained impressive though the writers and the books themselves give hints of the problems of brilliant academic achievement being sore let and hindered by lack of resources and a certain creeping lassitude and carelessness among clerical and book production workers which was partially generated by the colonial experience and its aftermath. Although the Jains did a great deal to develop colleges and places of higher learning, they did not endow many chairs of Jainology in them. After Independence a quantity revolution took place in the Indian Universities. A small number of new Departments specialising in Jainology and Jain related languages have come into being and a grounding was laid for the work which is presently appearing.
This period in Jainology is also sometimes criticised for failing (with notable exceptions) to pay attention to other aspects of Jainism outside the fixation on texts and philology. In the matter of community and anthropological study
of the Jain community in those days is a book acclaimed as unique though it has glaring weaknesses. This is Dr. Margaret Sinclair Stevenson's Heart of Jain25 ism.2 Because of its publisher and the strength of its field research, style and its connection with Christianity and women it has been till recently the best known and most read text in the west.. Dr. Margaret Sinclair Stevenson is writing in a missionary series. On its first page she quotes in Latin Augustine's Confessions "Thou hast made us for thyself and our heart is restless till it find rest in thee." She, one of the most brilliant British women of her age, is living in and giving herself to far away Gujarat. In the early 1900's even the inhabitants did not find Gujerat the happiest and most comfortable place on earth. It is charitable to try to detach, allow for and overlook, her Christian prejudices. Since a number of the people around us in U.S.A. are Christian it has to be remembered that some Christians fanatically believe everyone else is wrong, others realise (like the Jains) that there is a certain relativity depending on where you are going, who you are, etc. Dr Stevenson had partially moved towards the second pole as she shows in her manifest love and admiration for Jains, especially the women. Her work will be truly consummated when an American Jain woman scholar of brilliance who has studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin and German, writes a magnum opus on Christianity, especially its spirituality and its women.
In a number of ways Vilas Adinath Sangrave's Jaina Community,a Social Survey, carries on the study of the Jain community.26 But as we shall indicate it was to be much later and in a different form that this work is carried ahead. Recently at Vishva Jaina Bharati, Ladnun, Rajastan, "a deemed University," a whole phalanx of Jain teaching and life has been pin-pointed under the title " Life-Sciences." We shall say more of this later. In the 1950's and 1960's, one
"I believe that the tendency is towards vegetarian diet, that it will be recognized as fit and proper, and that the time is not far distant when the idea of animal food will be revolting to the civilized man."
-Sir Edward Saunders
7TH BIENNIAL JAINA CONVENTION - JULY 1993 For Private & Personal Use Only