Food and freedom

Abstract

I t is hardly controversial to say that Jainism has been ill served by western students of South Asian religions. Whilst the last twenty years or so have seen a massive increase in the description and interpretation of Hinduism and Buddhism as both textual and living entities, there has been no comparable at tempt to explore Ja ina civilisation, and its vast literary heritage, its history and contemporary institutions have been largely ignored. Certainly there has been a persistent interest in the religion on the part of a small number of continental scholars, concerned in the main with the elucidation of canonical texts, but British and American researchers have not emulated this, R. Williams' monograph on the medieval writings describing the idealised behaviour of the laity being the only comparatively recent work by an English speaking scholar to deal seriously with the Ja ina religion.1 The reason for this neglect deserves consideration. I t is true that few western libraries possess specialist collections of Ja ina literature but as such collections do exist in India, this is not an insuperable obstacle. When they have been studied, Ja ina texts are sometimes castigated for their aridity, 2 but such judgements do little more than reflect an unwillingness to come to terms with a different idiom. I f tedium be a criterion, and it should not, thenJa ina literature is never any more tedious than Buddhist Abhidharma texts which have received serious consideration by western scholars. To my mind, this neglect of Jainism can be traced, with some plausibility, to a perception of the religion which is best exemplified in Mrs Sinclair Stevenson's book, The Heart ofJainism. 3 Written from a background of Christian missionary work in Guj arat, this work, published over seventy years ago (being recently reprinted in India), is still frequently cited in bibliographies and, as a standard secondary source, exemplifies what may not unfairly be regarded as a general attitude towards Jainism in the English-speaking world. The title of Mrs Stevenson's book is heavily ironic: for her, the 'heart ' of Jainism is that it has an empty heart, the very nature of the religion ensuring that there is a spiritual vacuum

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