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RELIGION & CULTURE OF THE JAINS
town-planning, jewellery and precious stones, even the art of cooking. Interesting information about zoology, botany, alchemy, chemistry and other physical sciences is also not wanting. The purāņic literature and the canonical commentaries, apart from specific works on cosmography, contain much geographical information which can help to identify many an unidentified site and to locate new ones. We also come across names of many yet unknown kingdoms, foreign lands and non-Aryan or non-Indian tribes and peoples.
Then, many ancient and early mediaeval Jaina compositions throw a flood of light on India's inland and foreign trade both by land and sea or waterways, on commerce and industry, commercial organisations and trade guilds, market conditions and economic life of the people, and on the means of transport and communication. There are some vivid accounts of sārthavāhas, or inland caravans, and mercantile navigation, even of naval military expeditions.
The Jainas also wrote valuable commentaries on a number of important Brāhmaṇical and Buddhist works; Mallinātha, the most celebrated commentator of Kālidāsa, but for whom the peot's works would not, perhaps, have survived, was a Jaina. It should be obvious from the foregoing survey, cursory though it is, that the common prejudice which generally dismisses Jaina literature as simply sectarian and confined to a particular religion is sheer cavil. It has manifold attractions, not only for a follower of Jainism, or one interested in the study of Jaina philosophy, religion and culture, but also for a student of comparative religion and philosophy, for a lover of literature, and for the historian of Indian literature, culture and civilization. It is a very valuable and important, rather unavoidable, source of Indian history in its various aspects. It is also no exaggeration that the highly tolerant and cooperative spirit of the Jaina scholars and litterateurs helped to
