Jain Spirit 1999 10 No 02

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 61

BOOK REVIEW
SCRIPTURES ON THE JAIN COMMUNITY: COLLECTED ESSAYS ON THE JAINS
most markedly in freeing him from the necessity of taking an exclusively text-oriented approach. Cort's insistence in his introduction on the "profoundly radical thrust" of Folkert's scholarship may at first sight smack of special leading, but there can be no doubt that in several areas, and particularly his approach to the category of scripture, Folkert was clearly ahead of the times.
By Kendall W. Folkert; edited by John E. Cort Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993; Pp. xvii +451. $89.95. Reviewed by Paul Dundas
W hen Kendall Folkert was killed at the age of 43
VV along with the promising young graduate-student anthropologist Thomas Zwicker in a crash on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in October, 1985, he was the only scholar in the English-speaking world carrying out research into both the Jain community in India and its scriptural and intellectual tradition.
Chapters 3-6 of SAC, which deal with the nature and function of sacred literature, are representative of Folkert's general preoccupations and deserve to be pondered upon by all engaged in the study and teaching of religious traditions. Writing at a time when the Protestant Bible provided a virtually unchallenged academic model for the study of sacred texts (one which has by no means disappeared today), Folkert draws attention to the dangers inherent in privileging scripture as being solely what is written in a book. He calls on students of religion to display greater sympathy to the actual status of scriptural texts within each particular religious tradition and, in the specific context of Jainism, demonstrates how the notion of fixed canonicity was largely created by Western scholars in the last century at the expense of many alternative Jain enumerations of scriptural texts.
Folkert's direct field experience enabled him to see that the real significance of scripture for Jains hardly ever lies in the reading of so-called "canonical" writings but rather in the
Over the course of the century or so since Western scholars identified it as an independent religious path, Jainism was largely the subject of library-based investigation and, with one or two exceptions, its main interpreters were continental European philologists. For virtually all of these Western scholars, the realities of Jain life and culture as experienced by contemporary followers of the religion in India were of only marginal concern, and inaccurate text-derived generalisations, in which Jainism was portrayed as a kind of Hinduism or Buddhism "turned strange', flourished largely without qualification. Folkert's research at the time of his death into the various layers within the Pratikramana Sutra, the Jain confessional formula, and its contemporary ritual significance for the community which used it, was thus highly innovative.
On the basis of this surviving material, Folkert's friend and colleague John E. Cort has constructed a volume whose title Scripture and Community (SAC) reflects its author's most abiding academic interests. A reading of the book shows that Cort's editorial decisions (which include some discreet bibliographical updating) are triumphantly vindicated in that he has succeeded in presenting Folkert's work as an intellectually consistent totality and, as such, a Youth exchange - North America major contribution to the study of one of the world's oldest religious traditions.
community's ritual use of or contact with an extremely small
number of texts, particularly the Pratikramana Sutra, which But why should anyone beyond those professionally interested provides a kind of manual for periodical religious behaviour In Jainism bother to read this book? It must be emphasised throughout the year, an insight he felt to be of no small immediately that Folkert did not consider himself to be a
relevance when considering other sacred-book-oriented Jainologist in narrowly specialist terms. Rather, Jainism formed traditions. Folkert formulates his general views on scripture in the empirical basis for his wider reflections upon religion,
terms of what he styles, perhaps slightly clumsily. "Canon 1" while the insights derived from the discipline of religious
and "Canon 2", the former being sacred text vectored to its studies served to inform his general understanding of Jainism, audience, generally through ritual activity, while the latter is
60 Jain Spirit • October - December 1999