Peter Flügel

The Jaina Cult of Relic Stūpas

This article gives an overview of recent findings on the thriving cult of bone relic stūpas in contemporary Jaina culture. Although Jaina doctrine rejects the worship of material objects, fieldwork in India on the hitherto unstudied current Jaina mortuary rituals furnished clear evidence for the ubiquity of bone relic stūpas and relic veneration across the Jaina sectarian spectrum. The article discusses a representative case and assesses the significance of the overall findings for the history of religions. It also offers a new theoretical explanation of the power of relics.

Jainism and society

A review of John E. Cort: Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

The Codes of Conduct of the Terāpanth Sama[UNKNOWN]n Order

The article investigates the relationship between canonical rules (dharma) and customary rules (maryādā) in contemporary Jain mendicant life. It focuses on an analysis of the Terāpanth śvetāmbara Jain mendicant order and presents translations and analyses of the rules and regulations and initiation rituals for a new category of Jain novices, the saman order, which was introduced by the Terāpanth in 1981. It is argued that variations and cumulative changes in post-canonical monastic law can be understood in terms of rule specification and secondary canonization and not only in terms of exceptions to the rule. The article contributes both to the anthropology of South Asian asceticism and monasticism and to the exploration of the maryādā and āvaśyaka literatures of the Jains.

Book Reviews : Vinay Kumar Srivastava, Religious Renunciation of a Pastoral People, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. xiii + 314

the commodity to China often refused to play the Company’s game and remained willing to handle the opium being supplied by Indian concerns. Notable in this regard were the supplies of Malwa opium, which were able to pose a far greater threat to British concerns than either the Turkish or Persian opium supplies. Farooqui’s work shows us that the Indian merchant capital involved in the opium trade in the Malwa region was not only able to survive the strident British opposition, but that it could also respond by pressurising British trade networks in the subcontinent. The archival material utilised in this study reveals that the strength of this response on the part of Indian capitalism was fortified by the support, tacit or otherwise, of a diverse set of indigenous groups, ranging from the rulers of the regional Indian states to armed bandits. In fact, the capacity of Indian merchants to counter British business interests caused the company to opt for the simpler strategy of accommodation. Such an argument is, needless to say, consequential for a number of reasons. Most notably, it allows one to question theories drawn on a particular understanding of the resilience of the ’bazaar economy’, and shows just how complex