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Rightful exposition of Jainism in the West
N.L. Jain *
I have utilised the occasion of presentation of my paper on the 'concept of Zero in Jaina Texts' at the IV Int. Conference of Mathematics, Maebashi, Japan to visit the U.S. and Canada. Many learned Jaina saints, Bhattarakas and scholars have been going to the west for many years promoting Jainisum as a world religion through their lectures and practices. Many impressive narratives on these 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 religion or 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 departments in universities abroad and also there are large number of students in them. Despite this, there was hardly any knowledge about Jainism and its literature among them. There was virtually no Jaina literature there (except in Austin X.). However, there are courses on World's Religions and we could find many text books 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. Some books have good analytical descriptions like the QUP books of 1996 and 1997). The reason for this could be that our literature has neither * Jaina Kendra, Rewa (M.P.) 486001
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