Jinamanjari 2001 04 No 23

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 75

Jains of North India" (8). For this purpose he adopts a alternative theoretical perspective, losely following Bourdieu's model of "a field of forces with structured interests for the legitimation of religion" (8). The study is comparative in outlook and in seven parts.
The first Chapter ("Atheistic' Jainism') provides a short introduction into key characteristics of Jainism by comparing it to Hinduism and Buddhism. Chapter two (Textual Sources and Ethnographic Literature) begins with a brief overview of the principal sectarian divisions of contemporay Jainism (with the help of a diagram which incorrectly indicates that the Svetāmbara Terāpanthīs split from the Mūrtipūjaks) and two medieval Digambara Epics, the âdipuràõa of Jinasena and the Yaśastilaka-campū of Somadeva. It outlines the main differences between what the author perceives to be an ascetic or 'vaisya model' underlying the relationship between monks and laity within the Svetāmbara 'church' and a 'kingly model' informing the less organised Digambara 'sects', whose ascetics, the author argues, following Dundas (1992), once played a vital role "in practical affairs of state polity in [medieval) South India" (22): "To anticipate somewhat our later analysis, it will be argued that in the ancient and medieval periods of Jainism the stress on vegetarianism and no harm to even the smallest creatures was manifestly lacking; it was a development connected with the overall transition from a kshatriya to a vaishya model and a progression, to follow Weber, from the overall character of Jainism changing from a sect to a church" (22).
Chapter three (The Grand Transition in Jainism: Digambar and Shvetambar as Continuity and Change') sketches the differences between Digambara and Śvetāmbara traditions in terms of three further dichotomies which are interpreted as competitive cultural blueprints: individual patronage vs. organised lay following, charismatic prophets vs. routinised priesthood, fluid individualist sect vs. rigid group-bound church. The author goes on to criticise Michael Carrithers (1989), on whose work his own first three chapters strongly rely, for the neglect of