Collected Papers on Jaina Studies.

• Author: Heim, Maria
• Position: Book Review

By PADMANABH S. JAINI. New Delhi: MOTILAL BANARSIDASS, 2000. Pp. v + 428.

With the important exceptions of some work by Maurice Bloomfield and Norman Brown, Padmanabh Jaini is justly regarded as the first Indologist to engage in serious and sustained scholarship on Jainism in North America. Already well established at Berkeley in his first field of South Asian Buddhism by the 1970s, Professor Jaini then began to publish extensively on Jainism as well. In this volume, a collection of twenty-one previously published pieces, the extent of his contribution is brought into full view. It is a contribution marked by philological rigor, philosophical curiosity, and a deep familiarity with the rich textual traditions of both sides of the sectarian divide that splits Jainism historically and geographically into the Svetambara and Digambara schools.

The pieces here are assembled under the main topics that have captured their author's enduring interest over the years: Jain metaphysics and soul theory, karma theory, ethics and praxis, and the Jain Puranas. In nearly every piece Jaini's method is comparative: the structure and texture of Jain thought is best appreciated in the context of what it shares and where it departs from Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions. His work depicts a fascinating landscape of ancient Indian intellectual and religious competition in which Jains and Buddhists argued with each other and against Hindus about the nature of karma, the soul, the value of asceticism, and what their shared traditions mean. As is often the case with collections such as this, in which the author's labors are gathered from several decades and from a wide range of publications, the volume does not have a single audience. Some articles serve as introductions to Jainism, while others present advanced philological research. Needless to say, there are too many rich topics to cover at all adequately in a review, so I will confine my remarks to several of the most engaging themes in Jaini's work.

Some of the most intriguing articles treat Jain doctrines of the soul. For a tradition that, far more than any other Indian system, exhausted much philosophical labor in elaborating intricate theoretical speculations on karmic theory, it is somewhat surprising that several Jain doctrines posit theories of the soul that would seem to belie their sense of the otherwise all-pervasive grip of karma. One of the articles in the collection concerns the category of souls...