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Vol. XXI, 1997
REVIEWS
153
of the Irish Mission in Gujarat. The Indian barrister Jagmander Lal Jaini wrote a lengthy review of Mrs. Stevenson's book, in which in dozens of pages he has pointed out the many factual errors in her book; but few people outside India have taken notice of it. When she quotes Jainas, she ought to have tried to understand the statements of those people in the light of the religious tradition
they adhere. She has indeed summarized some of the main Jaina ideas in her book, but she disregards the meaningful theological context of Jainism itself when she criticizes these separate Jaina views. Instead, she offers new, i.e. Christian, meanings for Jaina terms and pretends that these are probably what had originally been meant by those terms in the first place. In this she is not original, for other missionary authors have done so in their descriptions of Asian religions long before her. Karma is, in her opinion, a "hideous thing", presumably because it is not personal and therefore cannot be influenced by prayers to it. The question of whether our world is a "fair" one, and of what justice there is in our having to live through numerous sorrows and sufferings, is of course the question of theodicy, which theistic thinkers in various traditions have tried to deal with in different ways throughout the centuries.
As an example of Jaina apologetic writing in response to what is seen as socalled scientific criticism of the Jaina tradition, the book The Scientific Foundations of Jainism written by K. V. Mardia and published by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, in 1990, tries to recast certain key concepts in Jaina philosophy and scholasticism in what he considers a scientific form, in order to show that Jainism is basically a scientific system of belief. In two places in the book, he also deals with the Jaina notions about gods. The author does not mention from where he got the idea that gatis are "mental states", and it seems that in this he was led entirely by his own, quasi-scientific imagination. Such writing reflects an interesting cross-cultural misunderstanding : rather than seeing the sciences in their modern Western form as something essentially nonreligious, authors such as Mardia apparently conceive of science as a rival system of religious thought, and he has implicity recognized the superiority of the sciences over his religion in an area where the natural sciences cannot claim much authority, if they claim any at all. Most Jaina studies which have been carried out by Western scholars, and by modern Indian scholars, have concentrated on the Jaina scriptural texts that contain the oldest historical material, viz., the canonical writings of the Svetāmbara sect in the Ardhamāgadhi language. It is typical of the romantic
