Jain Spirit 2002 06 No 11

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

Page 24

FEATURES
ROADS TO JAINOLOGY
Drawing from her rich experience of fieldwork in India, Professor Nalini Balbir invites people to pursue Jain scholarship
HE JAIN TRADITION IS A PART OF THE INDIAN CULTURAL context where it was born and has evolved for more
Indian society. Thus they always had to assess their own position within the surrounding environment. This has a lot of implications for their history and for the study of this history. Jainism cannot be studied in isolation from other Indian traditions.
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In order to become a Jain scholar, one has to study several languages as a minimum. This is hard work and requires commitment and dedication. When you are a 'novice' in Jain studies and you discover the field, you are fascinated as you realise the vast and almost unique length of this tradition. This holds especially true when you come to Jain studies from linguistics or philology or after studying classical languages (Latin and Greek) and Sanskrit. You soon realise that Sanskrit is absolutely necessary, given the vast bulk of Jain texts written in this language, from commentaries to original literary compositions, etc. Nevertheless, Sanskrit is not enough, for there are Shvetambara Canonical scriptures and Digambara works, which are in different varieties of Prakrit (Ardhamagadhi, Maharashtri, Shauraseni). So you will need to learn Prakrit. Then you immediately find that modern Indian languages are also a must for different reasons: they serve as a help to understand the earlier texts which they explain or retell (with discrete changes); they are also fully important for themselves, since they give access to present day Jains in India, especially to the monks or nuns.
Modern languages take us to the immense body of work the Jains have been writing for centuries as a means to understand their own traditions and to keep them alive. The painstaking work of Jain scholars from India has not been translated into English and is often difficult to access in the West, but it should not be neglected. Scholars such as the late Muni Punyavijaya, Pandit Sukhlalji, Pandit Dalsukh D. Malvania, Prof. H.C. Bhayani, A. Nahta and so many monks,
Jain Spirit June August 2002
have conducted unique research armed with very little resources but simply their deep curiosity. In an ideal situation, you should be able to have at least a working knowledge of Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada and even Tamil. In practice, this is seldom possible - everybody cannot be Padmanabh S. Jaini or A. N. Upadhye -, so the majority of scholars would select the languages which are more directly useful depending on whether they concentrate more on Jains in Western India or Jains in the South, even though any restriction in this field is never satisfactory. Of course, a would-be Jainologist should try to have some access to other European languages than English, especially German, Italian and French.
If you happen to discover the richness of Jainology through ethnology or anthropology, the study of contemporary Jains will be your main area. You will have mastered the relevant methodology, you will visit the communities, take part in ceremonies, etc. However, I would like to stress the following point: it is absolutely misleading to separate the various ways of approach, precisely because there is no interruption in the tradition. You can study modern religious hymns or legends in their own right and decide to approach Jain religiosity from the angle of today's practice and understanding, but how can you consider them in isolation from the past when the basic material is rooted in such a long tradition? How can you decide that only today's practice is significant and ignore the numerous theological and sectarian debates which have given birth to so many books written in the last centuries?
The politically correct tendency to draw a line between hard philology, exemplified by Western scholars of the 19th century who would have been consciously or unconsciously motivated by their European ideas and prejudices, and the 20th-century anthropologists, who would be the ones who really understand their object of study without bias, is rather misleading and implies a regrettably narrow understanding of