Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India

John Cort's Jains in the World—the product of some twenty years of fieldwork in the city of Patan in the state of Gujarat, India—is a welcome and vitally important contribution to the burgeoning literature in the field of Jain studies. Prior to Padmanabh S. Jaini's, The Jaina Path of Purification (published in 1979), scholars of South Asian religions in search of good English-language sources on Jainism had to content ourselves with works from earlier generations of indological studies, such as Walther Schubring's The Doctrine of the Jainas (translated from the German in 1962), or primary source translations from the nineteenth century. Good English sources on Jain philosophy could be found, such as Nathmal Tatia's Studies in Jaina Philosophy (1951), Y. J. Padmarajiah's A Comparative Study of the Jaina Theories of Reality and Knowledge (1963), and Satkari Mookerjee's The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism (1978). These are all, however, quite specialized works, focused on particular aspects of Jain thought, and not general introductions to Jainism or to the Jain community as a whole. They tell the reader virtually nothing about lived Jain practice (nor, to be fair, is that their intent).