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Chapter - 17
RIGHTFUL EXPOSITION OF JAINISM IN THE WEST
I have utilised the occasion of presentation of my paper on the Concept of Zero in Jaina texts' at the IV International Conference of Mathematics, Maebashi, Japan to visit U.S. and Canada. Many learned Jaina saints, Bhattārakas and scholars have been going to the west for many years promoting Jainism as a world religion through their lectures and practices. Many impressive narratives on their activities are published in Jaina papers here and abroad. My interest lay in learning the effect of these tours on western non-Jaina and scholarly world. Accordingly, I visited the religious studies departments of many universities, their libraries and public libraries. I also met many faculty members of these departments. I learnt that there are numerous religious studies department in universities abroad and also there are large numbers of students in them. Despite this, there was hardly any knowledge about Jainism and its literature among them. There was virtually no Jaina literature (except in Austin. Tx.). However, there are courses on World's Religions and we could find many textbooks on this subject written by competent teacher scholars. The students got the knowledge of Jainism through these books only. I read about 25 of these books written between 1889 and 1999 (two of them are published in India). They describe Jainism in four to twenty-four pages including some pictures of architectural importance. I was surprised to read their contents about Jainism in them. I could feel that there are many wrong conceptions about it among most of the scholars and, therefore, students also. If such descriptions are read, the new generation will have negative opinion. (This does not mean that all the books have similar descriptions.
This paper was published in 'Arhat Vacana, Indore, 2000.
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