Notes on Modern Jainism

Jainism,” says Monsieur A. Barth, “is one of the least known amongst those [religions] which have performed an important part in the past of India.” Dr. Burgess believes that “research during the last half century has perhaps been less directed to the study of Jainism than to any other branch of Indian study,”

This ignorance is all the more surprising when one-remembers the great interest which attaches to Jainism as “the only one of the almost primeval mendicant orders which survives in India at the present day,” and the contempt so liberally poured forth is scarcely merited by a religious community which has done much to foster the study of language and of science, whose members, though numbering less than a million and a third, are almost the most literate in India, whose temples are famous amongst the glories of the East, and whose worship far excels in purity of thought and ritual the Hinduism which surrounds it. — Author’s Preface