A Living Tradition of South Asia

Every twelve years, scaffolding rises around a fifty-seven-foot statue on a hilltop in Karnataka. The statue is of Bahubali — Gomateshwara, the son of the first Tirthankara — carved from a single block of granite in 981 CE by Chamundaraya, a general of the Western Ganga dynasty. For a millennium it has stood on the summit of Vindyagiri hill at Shravanabelagola, facing north, arms hanging at its sides, naked, expressionless, vines climbing its legs, an ant-hill forming at its feet. The statue is practicing kayotsarga — abandonment of the body. It has been practicing for a thousand years.

When the Mahamastakabhisheka comes — the Great Head-Anointing, performed since the statue's consecration, most recently in 2018 — priests ascend the scaffolding carrying 1,008 pots. They pour milk over the colossus. Then saffron water. Then sandalwood paste, turmeric, vermillion, sugarcane juice, and finally gold and silver flowers, cascading down the stone body in rivers of colour visible from miles away. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims — Jain and non-Jain alike — watch from the valley below. Some weep. Some chant. Some simply stand and look.

This is the central paradox of Jainism, visible in a single image: a religion that teaches non-attachment to all material things has produced some of the most magnificent religious architecture on Earth. A tradition that insists the highest spiritual achievement is the complete cessation of all activity has inspired, for more than two thousand years, communities of extraordinary energy — building hospitals, libraries, animal shelters, and temples of breathtaking beauty. A faith whose monks and nuns own nothing, not even clothing, is sustained by one of the wealthiest merchant communities in India. The stone Bahubali does nothing. He says nothing. He has been standing there, perfectly still, for a thousand years. And the community has been anointing him, adorning him, and weeping before him for exactly as long.

I. The Ford-Makers

Jainism understands itself not as a founded religion but as an eternal truth periodically rediscovered. The agents of this rediscovery are the Tirthankaras (तीर्थंकर — "ford-makers" or "bridge-builders"), enlightened beings who have crossed the river of worldly existence and established the tirtha — the ford, the community, the path — by which others may follow.

There are twenty-four Tirthankaras in the current cosmic cycle. The first is Rishabhadeva (also called Adinatha), who according to Jain tradition lived millions of years ago in a mythological antiquity that predates recorded history by orders of magnitude. Rishabhadeva is credited with establishing human civilisation itself: teaching agriculture, crafts, writing, and social organisation. He is less a religious founder than a culture hero — the being who made it possible for human beings to live as human beings.

The twenty-third Tirthankara, Parshvanatha (c. 872–772 BCE by traditional dating), is the first for whom historians can identify plausible historical traces. He is associated with Varanasi, with a community of monks and lay followers, and with a set of four vows (non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, and non-attachment) that would later be expanded to five by his successor.

The twenty-fourth and final Tirthankara of this cosmic cycle is Vardhamana Mahavira — the Great Hero — the figure around whom Jainism as a historically visible, continuously practised religion crystallised.

The concept of the Tirthankara is important because it establishes Jainism's self-understanding as something fundamentally different from a prophetic religion. Mahavira did not receive a revelation. He did not speak for a god. He did not innovate. He rediscovered — cleared away the accumulated debris of the cosmic cycle to reveal what was always there: the path across the river, the ford, the way to liberation from the endless suffering of birth and death and rebirth. Every Tirthankara discovers the same truth. The truth does not change. Only the world's capacity to hear it waxes and wanes.

II. Mahavira — The Great Hero

Vardhamana was born around 599 BCE (traditional dating) or 540 BCE (more cautious scholarly estimates) in Kundagrama, near modern Vaishali in Bihar. His family was of the Kshatriya (warrior) caste — the Jnatrika clan — and his parents, Siddhartha and Trishala, were followers of Parshvanatha's existing Jain community. The tradition records that Trishala had sixteen auspicious dreams before his birth, foretelling the arrival of a great soul.

The parallels with the life of the Buddha — his approximate contemporary, also born into a Kshatriya family in the same Gangetic plain, also destined for renunciation — are striking and well-noted by scholars. The two traditions grew in the same soil, addressed the same questions (suffering, rebirth, liberation), shared the same cultural vocabulary, and competed for the same followers. They diverged profoundly in their answers.

At the age of thirty (or twenty-eight, in some recensions), Vardhamana renounced his household life. The Digambara tradition holds that he never married; the Svetambara tradition holds that he married Yashoda and fathered a daughter, Priyadarshana, before leaving. This disagreement — which might seem trivial from outside — is one of the fault lines along which the Jain community would later divide, because it touches the question of what total renunciation requires and whether Mahavira himself exemplified it from birth or achieved it through a decisive act of will.

For twelve years and six months, Vardhamana practised the most extreme austerities the Indian ascetic tradition has ever produced. He fasted for months. He stood motionless in the sun. He endured attacks by villagers, insect bites he would not brush away, and the complete abandonment of every social bond. He did not beg for food — he accepted it only when offered, only what was left over, only what had not been prepared for him, only what met an extraordinary set of conditions designed to ensure that no living being was harmed in the provision of his sustenance.

At the age of forty-two, under a shala tree on the bank of the Rijupalika River, he achieved kevala jnana — omniscience, absolute knowledge, the complete and simultaneous cognition of all things past, present, and future, in all their modes of existence. This is not the same as the Buddha's enlightenment, and the distinction matters. The Buddha achieved nibbana — the cessation of craving, the extinguishing of the fires. Mahavira achieved kevala jnana — the ignition of total awareness. The Buddha's metaphor is a flame going out. Mahavira's metaphor is a mirror becoming infinitely clear.

For the next thirty years, Mahavira taught. He established the fourfold community (chaturvidha sangha) of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen — a structure that persists to this day as the fundamental organisational unit of Jain religious life. He attracted eleven chief disciples, the ganadharas, who compiled his teachings into the scriptural canon.

He died — or rather, achieved moksha, final liberation from the cycle of rebirth — at Pavapuri in Bihar, around 527 BCE, at the age of seventy-two. The tradition records that he died in the posture of meditation, having fasted for two days, and that his soul left the body and ascended to the siddha-loka — the abode of liberated souls at the apex of the universe — where it remains, eternally conscious, eternally free, forever beyond the reach of karma.

III. Ahimsa — The Refusal to Harm

The most fundamental principle of Jainism — the foundation of its ethics, its monastic discipline, its lay practice, its dietary laws, its economic behaviour, and its philosophical orientation — is ahimsa (अहिंसा): non-harm. Non-violence. The absolute, unconditional refusal to injure any living being, in thought, word, or deed.

This is not a recommendation. It is not a guideline. It is the first and greatest of the Jain vows, and it is understood as the precondition for every other spiritual attainment. Mahavira's formulation is uncompromising: All beings love life, hate death, fear destruction. Life is dear to all. Judge others by your own self. The Acharanga Sutra — the oldest Jain scripture — states it with absolute clarity:

All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away.

What makes Jain ahimsa distinctive — what separates it from the general Indian ethical principle that also bears the name — is its radicalism and its scope. Jain ahimsa applies not only to human beings, not only to animals, but to all forms of life, including insects, microorganisms, and even — in the Jain cosmological system — elemental beings that inhabit earth, water, fire, and air. A Jain monk or nun sweeps the ground before sitting to avoid crushing insects. A Jain monk or nun wears a muhpatti (mouth-cloth) to avoid accidentally inhaling small creatures. A devout Jain layperson will not eat root vegetables — onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots — because harvesting them destroys the entire plant and the organisms living in the soil around it.

The implications are enormous. Jain ahimsa effectively prohibited its adherents from agriculture (which requires ploughing, which kills soil organisms), from military service, and from most forms of manual labour that involve interaction with the natural world. This is not an accident of history but a structural consequence of the ethic itself, and it explains one of the most distinctive features of the Jain community: its overwhelming concentration in mercantile and financial occupations. If you cannot farm, cannot fight, and cannot build — you trade. And the Jain community, liberated by its own ethical constraints from the occupations that absorbed most of pre-modern India's population, became one of the most commercially successful communities in South Asian history.

The relationship between ahimsa and prosperity is one of the most interesting features of Jain civilisation. A community defined by renunciation produced extraordinary wealth. A religion that teaches non-attachment to material things created a merchant class whose philanthropy built temples, libraries, hospitals, schools, and — most characteristically — panjarapoles: animal shelters, sometimes enormous, where sick, injured, and aged animals are cared for at community expense. The panjarapole is perhaps the most complete expression of Jain ahimsa in institutional form: a place where the principle of non-harm is materialised as a building, staffed by people, funded by merchants, and populated by animals that have no economic value but have, in the Jain understanding, souls as real and as precious as any human soul.

IV. The Soul and the Universe

Jain metaphysics is rigorously dualistic. The universe is composed of two fundamental categories: jiva (जीव — soul, life, consciousness) and ajiva (अजीव — non-soul, non-living matter). Everything that exists falls into one of these two categories, and the purpose of Jain practice is to separate the jiva from the ajiva that has accumulated upon it, restoring the soul to its original condition of infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite bliss, and infinite energy.

The jiva is not a human concept. Every living being — from the most complex to the most elemental — possesses a jiva. Jain cosmology classifies living beings by the number of senses they possess: one-sense beings (earth, water, fire, air, and plants, which possess only the sense of touch), two-sense beings (worms, leeches), three-sense beings (ants, lice), four-sense beings (flies, bees), and five-sense beings (animals, humans, celestial beings, and hell-beings). Some five-sense beings also possess manas — mind, the capacity for rational thought — and these are the beings capable of pursuing liberation.

This is not metaphor. Jainism genuinely and literally holds that the stone beneath your feet may contain one-sense beings — prithvikaya jivas, earth-bodies — that experience a rudimentary form of consciousness, that suffer when harmed, and that deserve the same moral consideration as a human being. The water you drink contains apkaya jivas. The fire contains tejakaya jivas. The air contains vayukaya jivas. This is why ahimsa extends to elements that other religions regard as inert. For Jainism, nothing is inert. Everything is alive.

Karma in Jainism is not an abstract moral principle. It is a physical substance — an extremely fine form of matter that attaches to the jiva through actions of body, speech, and mind. Good actions produce light karma; bad actions produce heavy karma. All actions produce karma of some kind. The accumulation of karma obscures the soul's natural qualities — its infinite knowledge, its infinite perception — the way dust obscures a mirror. Liberation is the process of stopping the inflow of new karma (samvara) and eliminating the karma already attached (nirjara), until the soul stands clear, unobstructed, omniscient.

The liberated soul — the siddha — rises to the summit of the universe, to the siddha-loka, where it remains eternally, in a state of perfect consciousness, beyond all worldly contact. The siddha does not act. Does not create. Does not govern. Does not answer prayers. The Tirthankaras, while alive, taught and established communities. After achieving moksha, they are gone — present only as an ideal, an example, a possibility. This is why Jainism is sometimes called an atheistic religion. It does not deny the existence of divine beings — the Jain cosmos is populated with gods — but it denies that any god created the universe, governs it, or can save you. The universe is eternal. It was not created and will not end. And liberation is entirely, absolutely, the responsibility of the individual soul.

V. Anekantavada — The Many-Sidedness of Truth

Jain philosophy's most distinctive contribution to the history of thought is anekantavada (अनेकान्तवाद — "the doctrine of many-sidedness"): the principle that reality is complex, that truth has multiple aspects, and that no single perspective can capture the whole of any object, event, or proposition.

The classic illustration is the parable of the blind men and the elephant — a story that appears in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain literature, but which Jain tradition claims as its own and employs with particular philosophical precision. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant and declares the whole to be like a wall, a rope, a pillar, a fan, a pipe. Each is correct about his own experience. Each is incorrect about the whole. The elephant is all of these things and none of them exclusively.

Anekantavada is formalised in the syadvada (स्याद्वाद — "the doctrine of conditional predication"), which holds that any proposition about reality can be affirmed in seven ways:

1. Syat asti — In some respect, it is.
2. Syat nasti — In some respect, it is not.
3. Syat asti nasti — In some respect, it both is and is not.
4. Syat avaktavya — In some respect, it is inexpressible.
5. Syat asti avaktavya — In some respect, it is and is inexpressible.
6. Syat nasti avaktavya — In some respect, it is not and is inexpressible.
7. Syat asti nasti avaktavya — In some respect, it is, is not, and is inexpressible.

This is not relativism. Jainism does not hold that all perspectives are equally valid or that truth does not exist. It holds that truth is real, that reality has a definite nature, but that this nature is infinitely complex and can only be apprehended through multiple perspectives, each of which captures a genuine aspect of the real. The person who sees only one aspect and declares it the whole truth is not wrong about what they see. They are wrong about what they do not see. Dogmatism — the insistence that one's own perspective exhausts reality — is, in the Jain understanding, a form of violence: violence against the truth.

This philosophical principle has practical consequences. Jain communities have historically been among the most tolerant in India — supporting temples, monasteries, and scholars of other traditions, engaging in respectful debate rather than persecution, and maintaining a fundamental intellectual humility that sits alongside their extraordinary ethical rigour. You can be absolutely committed to non-violence and absolutely uncertain about the metaphysics. The two are not in tension. They are the same teaching.

VI. The Five Great Vows

Jain monastic life is organised around the Mahavratas (महाव्रत — "great vows"), five absolute commitments that define the renunciant path:

1. Ahimsa — Non-violence: the complete refusal to harm any living being, in any way, by any means, whether through action, speech, or thought.

2. Satya — Truthfulness: the refusal to speak what is false. But Jain satya is qualified by ahimsa — if the truth would cause harm to another being, silence is preferred. Truth is not an absolute that overrides compassion.

3. Asteya — Non-stealing: the refusal to take what has not been given. This extends beyond physical theft to include the use of anything beyond what one needs, the consumption of more than one's share, and even the desire for what belongs to another.

4. Brahmacharya — Celibacy: the complete renunciation of sexual activity and sexual desire. Mahavira added this as a fifth vow to the four vows of Parshvanatha, and it represents the Jain tradition's most absolute statement about the need to sever attachment to the body.

5. Aparigraha — Non-possession: the renunciation of all property, all attachment to material things, all desire for acquisition. For a Digambara monk, this extends to clothing itself — the truly non-possessive being owns nothing, not even a robe.

For lay Jains, these vows are observed in modified form as the Anuvratas (अणुव्रत — "small vows"), adapted to the realities of household life. A lay Jain practises ahimsa by following a vegetarian diet, avoiding occupations that involve harm, and supporting animal welfare. A lay Jain practises aparigraha by limiting possessions, giving generously to charity, and cultivating detachment from wealth even while earning it.

The relationship between monastic and lay practice is symbiotic. Monks and nuns depend entirely on the laity for food, shelter, and basic necessities. The laity depend on monks and nuns for spiritual instruction, the maintenance of the textual tradition, and — perhaps most importantly — the living example of what the vows look like when fully embodied. A Jain monk walking barefoot through a city with a broom and a mouth-cloth is not performing a ritual. He is showing what it looks like to take ahimsa seriously, all the way down, with no exceptions.

VII. Sky-Clad and White-Clad

The most visible division within Jainism is between the Digambara (दिगम्बर — "sky-clad," i.e., naked) and Svetambara (श्वेताम्बर — "white-clad") traditions. The schism is ancient — tradition dates it to around the third century BCE, though the fully separate institutional identities crystallised over several centuries — and it reflects not a doctrinal disagreement in the usual sense but a difference in understanding what total renunciation requires.

The Digambara position is that a fully liberated being possesses nothing — not even cloth. Mahavira himself, after achieving kevala jnana, wore no clothing. A monk who wears even a single white robe has not achieved complete non-attachment. Women cannot achieve moksha in a female body, because the Digambara tradition holds that true renunciation requires the abandonment of shame, and the cultural conditions of nakedness are different for women — a position that the tradition's own modern adherents increasingly debate and contest.

The Svetambara position is that clothing is not an obstacle to liberation. Mahavira wore a robe for part of his ascetic career. Women can achieve moksha — and indeed, the nineteenth Tirthankara, Mallinatha, was a woman (a claim the Digambara tradition rejects, holding that all Tirthankaras were male). The white robe is a mark of renunciation, not of attachment.

Beyond this central disagreement, the two traditions differ on points of scriptural canon (the Digambara hold that the original Jain scriptures — the Purvas — were lost and that no complete canonical authority survives; the Svetambara accept the existing Agamas as substantially authentic), on aspects of Mahavira's biography, on monastic practice, and on temple iconography. Digambara images of the Tirthankaras are always naked, with eyes open, in a posture of meditation. Svetambara images are clothed, adorned, with downcast eyes.

The two traditions have coexisted for two millennia without the violence that characterised Christian or Islamic sectarian disputes. They worship in each other's temples. They recognise each other as Jains. The disagreement is real and deeply felt, but it has not produced the kind of anathematising, excommunicating fury that the word "schism" evokes in Western religious history. This may itself be a consequence of anekantavada: the recognition that the other side may be seeing a genuine aspect of the truth that you cannot see from where you stand.

Within both traditions, further divisions exist. The Svetambara have three major sub-groups: the Murtipujak (image-worshippers, the majority), the Sthanakvasi (who reject image worship and worship in plain halls), and the Terapanthi (founded by Acharya Bhikshu in 1760, distinguished by a centralised monastic authority under a single acharya). The Digambara have their own sub-divisions, including the Bisapanthi and Terapanthi (confusingly, a different Terapanthi from the Svetambara one).

VIII. The Jain Temple

Jain religious architecture is among the most refined and elaborate in the world. The great Jain temple complexes — the Dilwara Temples at Mount Abu in Rajasthan (11th–13th century), the Ranakpur Temple in the Aravalli hills (15th century), the Palitana Temple Complex on Shatrunjaya hill in Gujarat (over 900 temples, accumulated over 900 years), and the Bahubali monolith at Shravanabelagola — represent sustained campaigns of devotional construction that rival the great cathedrals of Europe in ambition, craftsmanship, and the sheer investment of community resources.

The Dilwara Temples are particularly remarkable. Carved entirely from white marble, they contain some of the most intricate stone carving ever achieved by human hands. The ceilings are worked into patterns of such delicacy that the stone appears to be lace — pendant lotuses, concentric rings of carved figures, geometric patterns that repeat at scales visible only upon close inspection. The marble is so finely worked that in places it appears translucent. The exterior is deliberately plain — the beauty is hidden inside, visible only to those who enter. This is not accidental. It is a statement about the relationship between external simplicity and interior richness that mirrors the Jain understanding of the soul: plain on the outside, luminous within, revealed only through the practice of looking.

The central image in a Jain temple is the Tirthankara — seated in meditation or standing in kayotsarga, serene, detached, beyond the reach of the world. The image is not a god to be petitioned. Jain worship (puja) is not prayer in the theistic sense. It is an act of reverence toward an ideal: the being who achieved what you have not yet achieved, who crossed the ford you are still crossing, who demonstrated that liberation is possible. When a Jain devotee bathes the image, offers flowers, lights a lamp, and circumambulates the shrine, the devotee is not asking for anything. The devotee is remembering. The Tirthankara cannot hear the prayer — he is gone, beyond all worldly contact, in the siddha-loka. The prayer is for the devotee's own transformation.

IX. The Jain Calendar — Paryushana and the Cycle of the Year

The most important period in the Jain religious calendar is Paryushana (पर्युषण — "abiding" or "coming together"), an eight-day (Svetambara) or ten-day (Digambara, where it is called Das Lakshana) festival of fasting, confession, and spiritual intensification that falls during the rainy season, typically in August or September.

Paryushana is the climax of chaturmas — the four-month rainy-season retreat during which Jain monks and nuns remain stationary in one location (they normally wander, but the rains make travel dangerous for the insects and small creatures in their path). During these months, the monastic and lay communities are in close contact — monks and nuns deliver daily discourses, lay people attend in large numbers, and the entire community turns inward.

The final day of Paryushana is Samvatsari — the Day of Universal Forgiveness. On this day, every Jain seeks forgiveness from every being they may have harmed during the past year, whether intentionally or inadvertently, in thought, word, or deed. The formula is: Micchami Dukkadam (Prakrit: मिच्छामि दुक्कडम् — "May all my improper actions be fruitless"). This is spoken to family members, friends, colleagues, rivals, strangers, and — in principle — to all beings. It is a complete, annual, universal reconciliation, predicated on the recognition that in the course of living one inevitably causes harm, and that the honest acknowledgement of this harm is the beginning of its cessation.

Other important observances include Mahavir Jayanti (the birth anniversary of Mahavira, celebrated on the thirteenth day of the bright half of the month of Chaitra), Diwali (which for Jains commemorates not the return of Rama but the moksha of Mahavira — the night his soul left the world and the devas lit earthen lamps in honour of the light of his knowledge), and Akshaya Tritiya (the day Rishabhadeva, the first Tirthankara, broke his first fast with sugarcane juice, establishing the tradition of charitable giving).

X. The Jain Community Today

There are approximately four to five million Jains in India, concentrated in the western states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, with significant communities in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, and the major cities. The number is small — Jains constitute less than half a percent of India's population — but the community's influence is enormously disproportionate to its size.

Jains are among the most highly educated and economically successful communities in India. They are concentrated in business, finance, diamond trading, real estate, and the professions. The Jain contribution to Indian philanthropy is staggering: Jain families and trusts fund hospitals, schools, universities, disaster relief, and — above all — animal welfare institutions. The ancient connection between ahimsa and commerce persists: a community that cannot harm has channelled its energy into trade, and the wealth generated by trade has been reinvested in the infrastructure of compassion.

The Jain diaspora has grown significantly since the 1970s. Communities in the United Kingdom (particularly Leicester, which hosts one of the largest Jain temples outside India), the United States (New Jersey, California, the greater New York area), Canada, Kenya, Tanzania, and Belgium maintain active religious and cultural institutions. The diaspora has produced a generation of Jain scholars, professionals, and activists who engage with global conversations about vegetarianism, animal rights, environmental ethics, and religious pluralism from a distinctly Jain perspective.

XI. Jainism and the Modern World

Jainism occupies a peculiar position in the landscape of world religions: it is simultaneously one of the most ancient and one of the most modern. Its core commitments — non-violence, environmental sensitivity, respect for all forms of life, intellectual humility, vegetarianism (many Jains practise strict veganism), and a systematic scepticism about absolutist claims — align remarkably well with the ethical concerns of the twenty-first century.

Mahatma Gandhi — not himself a Jain, but raised in Gujarat in intimate contact with the Jain community — drew his understanding of ahimsa directly from Jain sources. The Jain monk Shrimad Rajchandra was among the most important spiritual influences of Gandhi's early life. Gandhi's transformation of ahimsa from a monastic discipline into a political weapon — the strategy of nonviolent resistance that would reshape the twentieth century — is, at its root, a secularisation of a Jain principle.

The contemporary Jain community is not without internal tensions. The practice of Santhara (or Sallekhana) — the voluntary, ritualised fast unto death, undertaken by a person who believes their life has reached its natural completion — has been the subject of intense legal and ethical debate. In 2015, the Rajasthan High Court banned Santhara, equating it with suicide; the Supreme Court of India stayed the ban, and the case remains unresolved. The Jain community's position is that Santhara is not suicide — it is the conscious, controlled, deliberate conclusion of a life, undertaken with full spiritual preparation, under monastic supervision, after all worldly obligations have been discharged. The community draws a sharp distinction between the despair that drives suicide and the equanimity that characterises Santhara. Whether Indian law agrees is an open question.

The role of women in Jain monasticism is another area of active debate. The Svetambara tradition has always admitted women as nuns — and indeed, Jain nuns have historically outnumbered monks, sometimes by ratios of two or three to one. The Digambara tradition's classical position that women cannot achieve moksha in a female body is increasingly contested from within, and in practice, Digambara women's renunciant orders exist and are growing.

What is not in question is the tradition's vitality. Jain temples are full. Jain monastic orders are recruiting. Jain festivals draw hundreds of thousands. The Paryushana season transforms entire cities — in Ahmedabad, in Jaipur, in Mumbai — into zones of vegetarian observance, as restaurants and markets voluntarily (or under community pressure) close their meat counters for the duration. The Jain community's political influence in western Indian states is substantial, and its philanthropic footprint is visible everywhere: the hospitals, the schools, the animal shelters, the libraries, the water projects, the disaster relief funds.

A religion that began with a man standing naked in the sun, refusing to brush the insects from his body, has become — without ever abandoning that original refusal — one of the most materially successful, institutionally robust, and ethically coherent religious communities on Earth. The paradox of the Bahubali statue at Shravanabelagola is the paradox of the tradition itself: absolute renunciation, absolute vitality, standing in the same body for a thousand years.

Colophon

This ethnographic profile of Jainism was composed for the Living Traditions section of the Good Work Library. It draws on the general body of Jain scholarship, including the work of Paul Dundas (The Jains, 2002), John E. Cort (Jains in the World, 2001), and the Encyclopaedia of Jainism edited by Indo-European Jain Scholars. Jain technical terms are given in their Sanskrit forms with Devanagari script. The profile attempts to convey both the philosophical depth and the living practice of a tradition that has maintained continuous existence for more than two and a half millennia.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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