The Indian religion of Jainism, whose central tenet involves non-violence to all creatures, is one of the world's oldest and least-understood faiths. Dundas looks at Jainism in its social and doctrinal context, explaining its history, sects, scriptures and ritual, and describing how the Jains have, over 2500 years, defined themselves as a unique religious community. This revised and expanded edition takes account of new research into Jainism.

I have attempted here to trace the development of Haribhadra's biography. My contention throughout has been that there is a basic incongruity between what one can discern from the actual works about the author Haribhadra and the legends that came to be associated with him. I have argued that the legends initially came from elsewhere in part from the legends of the arrogant monk who challenges the schismatic Rohagutta, and in part from the stories told of Akalanka, who probably was (...) Haribhadra's contemporary. The question must inevitably arise as to why these stories were attached to Haribhadra, when they so poorly match what we can clearly know to be the attitudes displayed by the writer of the works associated with his name. That is a question I cannot satisfactorily answer, although I suspect that in general the hostile attitude of the prabhadhas and related texts towards Buddhism is a late, deliberately contrived and very political stance.30 It would seem that these legends of Haribhadra and the stories told of others which are also replete with examples of Jain hostility to the Buddhists came to take shape around the 12th century A.D., during a period when Jainism was making significant Hindu conversions, particularly among royalty. We know that the prabandhas were primarily written for royal audiences or for ministers close to the kings. A natural question is then whether we can discern anything specific in the relationship between Buddhism and royal power during the 12th century in India that might have led Jain writers deliberately to cast the Buddhists in an unfavourable light and portray Jains as the extirpators of the Buddhist menace and thus as champions of the true faith. In fact the mid -12th century was a low period for the fortunes of Buddhism in its final stronghold in Bengal. Valāllasena of the Sena dynasty came to power c. 1158 A.D. His Dānas-agara was completed in 1169 A.D. and gives ample evidence of the strong emphasis on orthodox Hinduism and promotion of the cause of the Brahmins that historians have associated with the Senas.31 It is tempting to see in the prabandhas, which were addressed to the ruling class, and in the legends of Jain religious and intellectual leaders which emphasize the conflict between Jainism and Buddhism, a continued attempt to separate Jainism radically from Buddhism which was anathema to these kings in Bengal. Hindus had historically regarded Jains and Buddhists as equally outside the Hindu fold and outside the fold of civilization. That Jains in the 12th century devise biographies with a distinct emphasis on the Jain triumph over a Buddhist enemy requires some explanation. That the collections of these biographies were usually addressed to kings and their ministers suggests that courting the royal court may have had something to do with the tone of the biographies. The most obvious historical circumstance that suggests itself by way of explanation for the anti-Buddhist tone of medieval Jain biographies is the contemporary Hindu revival in Bengal with its decidedly anti-Buddhist stance. Perhaps Jain writers in seeking to win royal patronage for their faith and indeed royal converts felt the need to divorce Jainism from the religion with which it had been so closely associated and which became so obviously out of royal favour elsewhere in the country. I offer this only as a suggestion which must await further research for confirmation. (shrink)

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the (...) broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds. (shrink)

The Doctrine of the Jainas is an English translaton of the world famous German book Die Lehre der Jainas of W. Schubring by Wolfgang Beurlen. The author has also revised the English translation thoroughly. He has tried that the Jaina friends might come to obtain an idea of what has been accomplished by Western scholars during a period of about one hundred and fifty years, burning the midnight oil, with a view to make the world acquaint with one of the (...) finest achievements of the Indian mind. The author has tried to put the essence of Jaina religion and philosophy in a very clear way so that any student of religion or philosophy can easily trace out Jainism with a view of history, cosmology and cosmography. This enlarged edition contains three indices. (shrink)

"Next to Sartre's Search for a Method and in direct opposition to it, Foucault's work is the most noteworthy effort at a theory of history in the last 50 years." -- Library Journal.

This book changes your views on history, civilization, and the world. German philosopher and polymath Oswald Spengler displays his controversial opinions about world history. He defines "culture" as a superorganism which has a lifespan of birth, flourishing, and death, and defines "civilization" as the end-product of culture. He divides the entire history of the world into eight distinct cultures, from which all civilizations, religions, and wars arose. Spengler was criticized for his cataclysmic prediction of the downfall of western civilization in (...) the twenty first century, yet it's shocking to see markers for this prediction in everyday news. He claims that democracy is but the political weapon of money, and that media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. According to him, the penetration of money's power through a society is one of many signs of the shift from "culture" to "civilization". After reading this, you'll be more learned in history, philosophy, science, mathematics, architecture, music, art, literature, and even Greek and Latin. "When the first volume of The Decline of the West appeared in Germany a few years ago, thousands of copies were sold. Cultivated European discourse quickly became Spengler-saturated. Spenglerism spurted from the pens of countless disciples. It was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathize or revolt. It still remains so." "When Oswald Spengler speaks, many a Western Worldling stops to listen." New York Times. (shrink)

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning - its production, distribution, and consumption - in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in the content of the form, in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a fulfillment (...) of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded. (shrink)

A provocative critique of Western attitudes about the Orient, this history examines the ways in which the West has discovered, invented, and sought to control the East from the 1700s to the present.