Notes on Modern Jainism

Author(s): Mrs Sinclair Stevenson
Publisher: Oxford

Page 13

JAINISM.
“JAINISM,” says Monsieur A. Barth,* “ is one of the least known amongst those [ religions ] which have performed an important part in the past of India." Dr. Burgess † believes that “ research during the last half century has perhaps been less directed to the study of Jainism than to any other branch of Indian study," and it is probably owing to the prevailing ignorance of Jainism that a recent writeri has ventured to stigmatise it as “a religion in which the chief points insisted on are that one should deny God, worship man, and nourish vermin," and to such a religion he denies the right even to exist.
This ignorance is all the more surprising when one. remembers the great interest which attaches to Jainism as “the only one of the almost primeval mendicant orders which survives in India at the present day," and the contempt so liberally poured forth is scarcely merited by a religious community which has done much to foster the study of language and of science, whose members, though numbering less than a million and a third, are almost the
* Barth. Religions of India. p. 140. + Digambara Jaina Iconography. p. 1. Dr. Burgess goes on to point out that such research as there has been is chiefly directed to the literature of the Swetāmbara sect. Hopkins. Religions of India. p. 297.