Studies in Jaina History and Culture.

• Author: Geen, Jonathan

Studies in Jaina History and Culture: Disputes and Dialogues. Edited by PETER FLUGEL. Routledge Advances in Jaina Studies. New York: ROUTLEDGE, 2006. Pp. xvi + 478.

This book constitutes the inaugural volume of a new and hopefully prodigious series: Routledge Advances in Jaina Studies. The majority of the fifteen contributions grew out of papers delivered between 1999 and 2002 at the annual Jaina Studies Workshop at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Aside from a one-page foreword by Phyllis Granoff and a half-page preface by the editor, Peter Flugel, the individual papers, organized under five sub-headings, are left to stand on their own. This is without doubt a volume by specialists for specialists, and takes "dialogues and disputes," both within Jainism and with non-Jaina religious competitors, as an orienting perspective. Roughly a third of the book is comprised of notes and bibliography (a veritable mine of important though often difficult to acquire sources), and a useful general index. On the whole, the scholarship throughout the volume, whether philological, philosophical, historical, demographic, or ethnographic, is of the first order, and though the richness and depth of the papers routinely defied nutshell descriptions, it is all I can do to provide the briefest summary of the volume's content.

Three papers appear under the heading "Orthodoxy and Heresy." The first, by Willem Bollee, entitled "Adda or the Oldest Extant Dispute between Jains and Heretics (Suyagada 2,6): part one," focuses upon a dispute between the ajivaka Gosala and a man named Ardra (Pkt. Adda), who advocates for Mahavira (Sutrakranga 2.6.1-25). Part two of Bollee's paper (Sutrakrtanga 2.6.26-55), in which Ardra encounters Buddhist monks, a Brahmin, a Vedantin, and an "elephant" ascetic, appeared in print some time ago (Journal of Indian Philosophy 27 [1999]: 411-37), and should be read as a companion piece. The dispute with Gosala is brief and philosophically unsophisticated, and Bollee's main contribution here is in the wide-ranging and meticulous philological research used to produce his translation (surely what Granoff intended by "a continuation of the best of nineteenth century philology"). His short though remarkable translation is a stark reminder of the difficulty faced in elucidating the often enigmatic portions of the earliest layers of the Jaina agama. In "The Later Fortunes of Jamali," Paul Dundas explores the Jaina attitude towards their first heretic Jamali, who, like Devadatta in the Buddhist tradition, caused a rift in the Jaina monastic community. Tracing the story from the canonical account (Bhagavati 9.33)...