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JANUARY, 1993
Jains have also been excluded from some assemblies of world religions as it was done in Toronto some years ago by the "ecumenical" convenors of a conference on One-God's religions. The organizers are reported to have said that Jains were not included because they are atheists.
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True, Jains do not believe in a Creator-God of the universe, but they are not godless people.
There are many other glaring misconceptions about Jains in certain other quarters. The stereotypical image of Jains is "a sect of the naked" as an encyclopedic entry would reveal. The image was most prevalent in a video produced a few years ago by an American sympathetic of Jaina tradition.
The same is even true of a scholarly book that has become the most widely read book on Jainism in modern times, and is one of the recommended texts in a course of Jaina studies. The frontis-piece of this book is the naked statue of Bahubali.
There is nothing strange, exotic or lewd about nakedness to an initiated mind. But to the western eyes, with a heritage based on Judaeo-Christian, Catholic traditions, nakedness is associated with guilt and sex. Pictures of humans showing private parts are not just acceptable in school text-books. That's why when the Institute of Asian Cultures of Windsor, Ontario, tried to donate, in the midseventies, a hundred sets of forty plus children's books each in English (all published in India) to the public schools in Essex, Middlesex and Lambton counties, some schools discarded or refused the sets because one of the books contained a picture of the naked statue of the 24th Tirthankara.
No doubt, nakedness is the supreme form and example of the Jaina principle of aprigraha, but it is practised only by Jaina monks, and that also by a very small proportion of all monks, especially in southern India.
Perhaps the most appropriate frontispiece of a book on Jainism should be the Jain mula-mantra (the universal prayer) or the word "ahimsa" or the phrase "ahimsa parama dharamḥ," or a picture of a bird/animal hospital.
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