Open Boundaries : Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History

Contents: 1. Introduction: contested Jain identities of self and other/John E. Cort. 2. Haribhadra\'s analysis of Patanjala and Kula Yoga in the Yogadrstisamuccaya/Christopher Key Chapple. 3. Becoming Gautama: Mantra and history in Svetambara Jainism/Paul Dundas. 4. Hemacandra and Sanskrit poetics/Gary A. Tubb. 5. Erotic excess and sexual danger in the Civakacintamani/James Ryan. 6. Who is a king? Jain narratives of kingship in medieval Western India/John E. Cort. 7. Sweetmeats of corpses? Community, conversion, and sacred places/Michael W. Meister. 8. Ritual culture and the distinctiveness of Jainism/Lawrence A. Babb. 9. Sramanas against the Tamil way: Jains as others in Tamil Saiva literature/Indira Viswanathan Peterson. 10. Jain and Hindu "Religious women" in early medieval Tamilnadu/Leslie C. Ott. 11. The story of the disappearing Jains: retelling the Saiva-Jain encounter in medieval South India/Richard H. Davis. References. Index.

"Open boundaries provides a new perspective on Jainism, one of the oldest yet least studied of the world\'s living religions. Ten closely focused studies investigate the interactions between Jains and non-Jains in South Asian society, with detailed studies of yoga, tantra, aesthetic theory, erotic poetry, theories of kingship, Goddess worship, temple ritual, polemical poetry, religious women, and historiography. Viewing the Jains within a South Asian context results in a strikingly different portrait from the standard models represented in both traditional western and Indian scholarship."

[John E. Cort is Associate Professor of Religion at Denison University.]