Jainism by Vividus

Author(s): Ramnik V Shah
Publisher: Ramnik V Shah Canada

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As regards the objectionable statement viz .Jainism is not a separate religion or faith but only a sect,' I regret it should have crept up though unintentionally and inadvertently in my letter. It was wholly due to a confusion of two words-religion and community. THE TERM HINDU RELIGION IS A MISNOMER. Hindu is a name of the community comprising all persons professing religions of the Indian origin-Vedic, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism etc. What I intended to show was that the Jain community was not different from the great Hindu community, though they may be following different lines of philosophy and thought. Instead of 'community,' the word "religion' crept in due to the interchanging and loose use of the terms in Indian languages.
Such historic misnomers, however, have a tendency to continue and perpetuate themselves in the mind of mankind. One is just helpless before them. Two such other classic misnomers come immediately to mind. The "United States of America'' i.e. the U.S.A. is loosely called 'America' though in that huge continent of land between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, the portion occupied by independent Canada in the North, and Mexico and other so many independent countries in the South, by far exceeds the portion of land occupied by the U.S.A. The other misnomer is the word "Red Indian" or only "Indian" used to describe the original inhabitants of North America later displaced to live only in *'reserves," simply because Columbus in 1492 called them erroneously and ignorantly so. How wrong and inappropriate this is, particularly in view of the existence of India and the six hundred and fifty million Indians ten thousand miles away for whose exploration Columbus had in the first instance set out his sails !!
VI GODS?
No appropriate synonyms are found in the English language to express full and exact meanings of the terms used in Jaina
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