JAINA Convention 1993 07 Pittusburgh

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

Page 48

including those overtaken by Partition are continuing to be catalogued edited and collated. The whole attitude of the modern fundamentalist western approach to authorized, canonical texts must give place to something nearer to real life. Here the urgent need of Christianity to be aware of and use its interdependence with other religions is underlined. Beside commentaries and text editions, various helps to study and aids to understanding exist in Hindi and no doubt in other Indian languages which we sorely lack in English. Jainendra Jaina's Dictionary, comes immediately to mind.34 The community must decide, now English has reached the status of a world sacred language, if it is worthwhile to do translations or to wait for a new generation of Jain scholars with English as a first language and computerese as a second to produce or duplicate them.
In India as well as among those living abroad, the diaspora, the nature of the relationship of the Jain dharma to the "Hindu" and the Buddhist is also being thought out now by non-violent people less and less in terms of the earlier western religious denominations fighting one another and competing but of people living and working together and sharing a culture. In a living corpus or body separate systems co-exist and impermeable partitions are rare. The British Orientalists' paradigm for the History of Indian Religions has been overturned by archaeology amongst other things. The missionaries and Orientalists first met male pandits who extolled Sanskrit and "Brahmanism." Now Hindi speakers at Conferences such as that held in New Delhi in February 1992 by the Rishabdev Foundation are asking whether the sharing of features with the Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Vedas is a purely one way traffic, merely borrowing and re-working by Jains of "Hindu" themes. The naked mendicants who wander in and out of literature, the iconography of Moenjodaro and Harappa,
46
may have something fundamental to tell us about Jain antiquity. The claim in this speculation is not proprietary, there is no cry of "Jainism was there," or Hum Hindu nahin hai but rather a call to realize the fluidity and inter-dependence of Indian religion with elements which afterwards we recognize as specific, pointing to a certain primordiality of Jain features. As we begin to catch a glimmer of the basic religiousness of humanity and through humanity of the universe, it is possible that we see in Jainism with its non-violence and joyful co-dependence an abiding and unchanging element in our universe which may take the place of "nature red in tooth and claw" and "man rampant on a field of pollution." The Jain Declaration on Nature presented to the Duke of Edinburgh grows out of a world-wide, not just a US/UK earth.
Developments in the Last Decades
This last ten years has also seen the fuller emergence into self-consciousness of the world-wide Jain diaspora, that is people of Jain descent domiciled overseas.. The jet, de-regulation of air traffic and modern telecommunication have done for us in the world what the old colonial railways and telegraphs did for our great grand-grandfathers inside India. On one side the jet has made it easy for us to go to India and receive the ministrations and benefits of being with monks and nuns. Some significant and successful efforts have been made to bringing those ministrations to us in the west. Of these we shall say something below. But the quintessential characteristics of the monks and nuns who do not use mechanical transport and indeed of being possessionless to the point of having not even a cloth, cannot be abandoned or lost: of their very nature these have significance for the totality of planet. Their strict retention calls not only for us to discover ways of retaining them in modern conditions but demands
we should think out who the "laity" and "the house-holders" are and strengthen who they are and what they can do. It is they who are the mainstream and backbone of Jainism in the west. A householder is a person in his or her own right, not just a deficient monk or nun.
These last decades have seen new developments of the continuation and perfecting of earlier efforts. Many educated westerners using the library and book-seller services so readily available to them have been able to become aware of some of the cultural achievement of the Jains in every age in its many-faceted genius and prolific ability. "Coffeetable" picture books in color photography dealing with Jain sculpture, for instance at Belgola, Mount Abu, Khujaraho and Ellora, are available and are being followed up by well-produced and striking videos and films.35
The Jain teachings on cosmology and its related mythology has a long and fascinating history full of the wellknown Jain proclivity for mathematics and immense microscopic detail, is ably summed up by Collette Caillat and Ravi Kumar.36 For an introduction to the understanding of Jain statues, murtis (idols) and decorative art, most of the large University libraries are able to provide Jyotindra Jain and Eberhard Fisher's Jaina Iconography.37
The anthropological and sociological and community study (and Indian Universities seem wise in not overseparating them) of the Jains has in recent years been carried forward by excellent joint works with participants including both Indian and foreign scholars.38 It is interesting to note that increasing cognizance is being given to the Jain diaspora. 39 In the U.S.A. as part of the Harvard Pluralism Project supervised by Professor Diane Eck, contact was made with Dr. Sulekh Jain of the Jaina Society of North America and a number of papers on the Jain side of the research have been prepared by Holly Seeley including such topics as family issues,
"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat..."
-Leonardo da Vinci
7TH BIENNIAL JAINA CONVENTION - JULY 1993 For Private & Personal Use Only