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JAINA ICONOGRAPHY: TOWARD A COMPARATIVE APPROACH
Jinamanjari, Volume 25, No.1, April 2002
Dr. Thomas McEvilley, New York City
It is remarkable how little attention western scholars pay to Jainism. In art history and iconography--the central focus of this essay-the situation is extreme. In books like Benjamin Rowland's classic of 1953, The Art and Architecture of India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Susan Huntington's 1985 book of almost identical title, 7he Art of Ancient India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, a reader might assume that Jainism was prominent. In fact neither book has more than a handful of pages-say, five or ten--on Jainism--out of 500 in the one case and 750 in the other. The dates of the two books suggest that the increased interest in eastern religions among Westerners in the last couple of generations has not significantly changed this imbalance. One might expect that the Jain doctrine of anekantavada, the multi-facetedness of reality, would become somewhat popular in a period when, as now, Western culture has been in the process of becoming more pluralistic and relativistic but not so. While Hinduism and Buddhism in the last half century, have become worldwide religions with converts of all ethnicities and nationalities, Jainism remains a religion more or less exclusively for Jains.
The result is that texts on Jainism deal with Jain tradition from inside, from an emic, as anthropologists say, rather than an etic point of view. The emic assumption always is that the topic is sufficient unto itself, that it needs no larger context. While that is perfectly understandable in discourse among members of a religious community, it means that Westerners in general do not see Jainism contextualized in a way that they can use in a general study of the history of religion, or of art, or of iconography.
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