By Dr Jeffrey D Long
2010 22 x 14 cm 240 pages
Paperback
Jainism is one of the ancient religions of India. Despite its age, and some features that many in the Western would regard as exotic, it is highly relevant to the contemporary world in many ways. While it is a religion that has a lot in common with the Buddhist and Hindu traditions of India, and has co-existed with them for at least two and a half millennia, it also has many distinctive features and insights which distinguish it from these other traditions.
The main goal of the author is to make the Jain tradition accessible to the average Western reader, on the assumption that knowledge of this tradition will be of global benefit.
This is not a book for experts on Jainism. Nor does it claim to be an exhaustive or comprehensive account of Jainism, or a reference work where one could find everything one wanted to know about this tradition. It is not a detailed monograph on one particular aspect of Jainism. Nor does it pretend to be a book that would explain to Jains how they should view their own tradition.
The author is not a Jain. But he views both the Jain religion and the Jain community as embodying ideals and practices that have relevance for all human beings. The author is not the first non-Jain to view the Jain tradition as universally relevant, for Jainism, throughout its long history, has had a significant impact on the Hindu and Buddhist traditions which have been its primary interlocutors.
It is the view of author that a global extension of the influence of Jain ideals would be a welcome development: that Jain principles like non-violence (ahimsa), non-attachment (aparigraha) and non-absolutism (anekantavada) are vitally important, globally relevant principles that have a great deal to recommend them even to those who are not Jain. In other words, one need not be a Jain in order to learn valuable lessons from Jainism.
Even though its primary mandate is to describe Jainism as accurately and as fairly as possible, what makes this book one of the best books on Jainism written in English in the past decade is that the author, Dr Jeffrey D Long, offers both: description as well as interpretation. He explores Jain asceticism, Jain worship, the life of the Jain layperson, relations between Jainism and other Indic faiths, the Jain philosophy of relativity (anekantavada), and the implications of Jain ideas for the contemporary world. This book presents Jainism in a way that is both authentic and engaging to specialists as well as the common reader.
Dr Long chairs the Department of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, USA.
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