Dr. Noel Q. King
Let us look briefly at three notable cases of westerners writing about Jainism. Professor Herman Jacobi (1850-1937) gave a life time's dedicated labour to work on Indian astrology, philosophy and religion. His best work was on Jainism. In 1873 he spent a year in India and visited ancient Jaina renunciant communities in Rajasthan. In 1913 he came to India again and was highly honoured by the jaina community. In his writings and his speeches he showed warm admiration for Jainism. Yet he was very reluctant to touch on the effect of Jaina belief on a person's life or on the presence and effect of a Jaina community on a country or nation. That sort of reflection did not enter his head or to write about it was considered contrary to academic protocol. He was born in Koeln, he studied at Bonn, he taught at Muenster, Kiel and Koeln: his active career as a thinker and writer went on from the 1870s to 1930s when Germany (and especially the towns where he lived), as the epitome of western culture, learning, technology and science was hurtling on its way to the apocalyptic of Nazism. The Nazis claimed to be Aryans, while the expert on what true Aryanism meant did not feel impelled to tell his compatriots they had got things wrong way around, not only the swastika. It is not for us to sit in judgment on the great ones of the past; there is something in our system and ways of thought that needs to be put right.
The other most influential former and shaper of western views of Jainism stopped to consider the cosmic and universal significance of Jainism and then put it in the wrong place. Dr. (Mrs.) Margaret Sinclair Stevenson had covered herself with honours at Oxford before women could be given degrees there. She also had an earned Doctorate in Civil Law from Trinity College, Dublin. One of the most brilliant women of her day, she gave her career as a devotional offering to Gujarat. Her Heart of Jainism was remarkable for its field-work, especially among women, and its grasp of the beauty of Jaina spirituality.
Oxtord University Press, London, 1915, reissued New Delhi by Munshiram Manoharlal in 1984.
It remained the standard and main source for around seven decades. But it was published in a missionary series and had to have remarks coming from the author's "fundamentalistic" background.
In fairness to Christianity as a whole it must be pointed out that the fundamentalists approach as we know it in this century is something modern and is not typical of the Christian approach to other religions, In Dr, (Mrs.) Stevenson's day time in her kind of circles, despite their best efforts, it included the idea that things western came as the zenith of an evolutionary process.
Jainism did not have at its center a loving creator God willing to atone every thing, ergo it had no heart. It reminds one of friendly advice on a certain fine internationally respected New England newspaper. "It makes wonderful sense as long as you do not read the religion section." This brilliant woman scholar who served with practical love through the hardships even of the great Gujarat famine of 1900, was prevented by her form of faith from seeing what her Master would have seen.
Some Christian leaders like the main organizers of the parliament had already in 1893 moved on from that position. Today the “Main Line Churches" have also to some extent moved on, but there are still powerful and well-organized groups who can do much to delay understanding and co-operation. Much work of education remains to be done.
For the coming together of west and east, whatever Kipling may have meant in Gunga Din, both west and east had to do some things. The west needed a wholesale change of attitude. The average American, British, or European had fundamentally to question the adequacy and fulfillment of western ways of life and thought. Actually, the millennial and eschatological scenario in our background suggests things are not only inadequate but hopeless without outside help. The city, the family, sexes and gender relations, health and medical arrangements, the city, political, scientific and economic paradigms and structures are falling apart and we seem hell-bent on destroying ourselves in pollution and in a dying ecology we have sorely wounded. All our traditions, including our religions, need a vigorous infusion of new thought and structure if we are going to survive.
From three decades ago earlier we can trace a trail of westerners going to India and taking on the life of local devotees in an Indian religious community and then either writing books or coming back and starting Indic-type communities in the west. The Beatles and the Rishikesh schools took the limelight but there are notable other instances including some in the Jaina tradition. For example, a French Catholic woman who is most self-effacing has immersed herself for years in the life of the Jaina women's renunciant orders. Her book Loa Voie Joino indicates what she was looking for and what she found - the world's most senior women 's order in which women's spirituality comes into its own.
She signs herself N.Shanta. The subtitle is "Histoire. spiritualite. vie des ascetes pelerines, de I' Inde”, It was published by a distinguished but small publisher, 0. E. I. L. in Paris in 1985. It grasps firmly that we westerners real India ideas through Hindu Sanskritized eyes so it carefully explains the subtlety of and nuances of Jaina use of the same words. It so brilliantly conveys the meaning in French it is very difficult to transpose into English. Professor Padmanabh Jaini's Gender and Salvation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, provides most valuable background in the ancient Jaina debates on woman's spirituality.
This work is being met and reciprocated by highly educated Jaina women in both western and eastern traditions who are inside the Jaina women's orders. Another example is work by a former Dartmouth Professor of Ecology and Humanities which sums up most strikingly the significance of Jainism for the west especially in ecology.
Michael Tobias: Life Force. the Word of Jainism, Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1991, The film he made, Ahimsa is a companion to the book. He is following up with more writing and film work.
It is important to note the contemporaneity in the issue of a Declaration on Nature which was produced by an Indian and diaspora group and presented to H.R.H. Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh as President of the World wide Fund for Nature International in 1990.
The Jaina Declaration On Nature by Dr. Laxmi Mall Singhvi, published by the Federation of Jaina Associations in North America. Cincinnati, 1990.