Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India.

• Author: Lutgendorf, Philip
• Position: Book Review

Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India. By JOHN E. CORT. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. 267 + xvi, maps, illus.

As a student of mainly Hindu traditions, who had only slight acquaintance with Jain ideology and who found Jain art to be generally repetitive, static, and dull (I had Jain images in mind), I was quite unprepared for my first visit, a few years back, to the medieval temples on Mount Abu and at Ranakpur, Rajasthan. The latter in particular dazzled me to the extent that I changed my itinerary to permit an extra day of wandering, in what I can only call a state of rapture, in its cosmographic labyrinth; I also witnessed a number of intriguing rituals performed by lay Jains and had interesting conversations with the temple's (Hindu brahman) priests. The experience made me realize how little I knew about the practical expressions of Jain dharma, and caused me to reflect that its severely ascetic ideology obviously coexisted with a sophisticated appreciation for the exuberant and sensory life of this world.

John E. Cort's Jains in the World offers an excellent guide to the similarly perplexed, as it focuses on precisely this coexistence. Based on several years of fieldwork, spread over almost two decades, mainly among the Svetambar Murtipujak Jains of Patan in northern Gujarat, it is centrally concerned with what Cort calls the "unresolved tension" (p. 200) between the explicit ideology of the moksa marg--the path of liberation revealed by the enlightened Jains of each world cycle--and the implicit but pervasive notion of "wellbeing"--a heuristic label for a constellation of indigenous terms that connote "health, wealth, mental peace, emotional contentment, and satisfaction in one's worldly endeavors" (p. 7). Since the latter categories are generally scorned by the authors of the Jain scriptural canon (although, as Cort demonstrates, they remain central to the vocabulary and imagery of its texts), they have largely been ignored in previous scholarship on the Jains, which has mainly focused on the ascetic doctrines and elaborate cosmology of the moksa marg and on their expression in the practice of Jain renunciants. In contrast, Cort (expanding on the recent research of Lawrence Babb, and on the tragically aborted fieldwork of Kendall Folkert and Thomas Zwicker) sets out to foreground (against the necessary backdrop of moksa marg ideology) "the behavior that constitutes the lived experience of Jains as...