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How Jains Know What They Know :
A Lay Jain Curriculum
John E. Cort
In a fieldwork entry dating from 1985, the late Kendall W. Folkert gave a list of what he called “lay readings' according to Munijī.” At the time Folkert was researching the Svetāmbara Jain scriptural canon with an eye to understanding it from a performative perspective. He sought to understand the Svetāmbara canon as it is shaped or vectored by actual ritual performance (in this case pratikramana), rather than by any abstract theoretical framework'. Folkert had obviously asked Muni Jambūvijayjī, with whom he was studying as part of this research, what Munijī thought would make up a lay Svetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka Jain canon. The lay canon listed by Muni Jambūvijayjī is not shaped exclusively by ritual performance, but rather is a reading list that would tell a lay Jain what he or she needs to know, both to perform a number of key Jain rituals and to understand the cosmological, theological, and philosophical assumptions that underlie those rituals. What is immediately noticeable about this list is that it does not include many of the texts one might expect, texts found in most introductory accounts of the Jains, such as the 11 Svetāmbara angas. The texts on this list are not the "original canon" of early Jainism, but rather medieval textbooks designed for the systematic study of Jain doctrines and practices in their developed and mature forms. Most of the texts on this list are missing from almost all overviews of Jainism in any language, even the excellent recent English ones of Jaini (1979) and Dundas (1992). The list is as follows:
1. Panca Pratikramana (= vernacular for avasyaka)
II. Nine Smaranas (poems used as mantras)
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