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JANUARY, 1993
137
much attention until 1915 when Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson's book, The Heart of Jainism, was published in Oxford.
Stevenson's work was not very sympathetic to the Gujarati Jaina (Digambara) community. Her criticism of Jaina monks and nuns, with whom Jainism is often equated, is in line with the criticism offered by the Sikh Guru Nanak and the Hindu reformist Swami Dayānand Saraswati.
Stevenson's work jolted the Jaina community from its slumber to counteract the criticism heaped on them by the authoress, the most spirited defence being offered by Jagmandarlal Jaini (1916, 1925).
However, German scholars like Hermann Jacobi, J. G. Bühler, Walther Schubring and, in recent times, Ludwig Alsdorf, and in France Professor A, Guerinot and, currently, Madame Colette Caillat have been more sympathetic to Jaina traditions and cultural values. They have been, in my opinion, instrumental in introducing Jaina ideals and sacred texts to their respective audiences and the world at large once their works have been translated into English.
Though there is some evidence that Jainism was known to a select group of people in the U.S.A. in the late nineteenth century, it was not until 1883 that it was formally introduced to North America by V. R. Gandhi at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago.
Since then many Jaina organizations in India, and more recently in U.K. and U.S.A., have produced sizeable amounts of literature in English. Though some sacred texts of the Jainas are now available in English translations, "there is not available as yet an easily readable complete set of the Jain scriptures in Hindi or in English" (Jaini, 1.90 : 8-9).
For a student of Jaina Studies this is a sad situation. Though more and more works of an explicative nature on Jaipa psychology, yoga, etc., are now available, and some doctoral dissertations on Jaina themes have been written at North American and European institutions,“Jainism is still a relatively neglected subject in Western Indology”, says Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos (1991 : 178)
This situation needs to be corrected. But there are many practical problems.
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