Jainism And Early Buddhism

A collection of papers presented at an international conference on Jainism and early Buddhism in honor of Prof. Padmanabh S. Jaini, organized and hosted by the Department of History of Religions at the University of Lund, Sweden in 1998. Prof. Jaini is professor emeritus of Buddhist Studies at University of California, Berkeley, California, USA and one of the foremost contemporary scholars of Buddhism and Jainism. The two part festschrift contains papers presented by thirty seven prominent scholars, covering a wide range of topics in both religions.

Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

This book was a paper read by the author at a meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society on Feb 26, 1877. Apart from analyzing the early and pre Buddhist phase of the rule of Asoka, its also has notes on the ancient religions of the east derived from the pantheon of the Indo-Scythians. Also prefixed is a notice on Bactrian coins and Indian dates. This book is not a popular account of Asoka but is of great value to the researcher. This book is a reprint of the 1877 edition.

In this volume, a companion to the author`s Collected Papers on Jaina Studies, twenty-nine of his articles, encompassing some forty years of research on various facets of Buddhism, have been brought together for the first time. They cover a wide range of topics including comparative studies with Jainism, points of controversy within Abhidharma, the Bodhisattva career of Maitreya based on narratives from the Jatakas and Mahayana Sutras, and selections from Buddhist ritual texts.

Throughout the centuries, moral philosophers, both Eastern and Western, considered a permanent and eternal law a necessary requirement for the formulation of a moral principle. If such a law was not empirically given, it had to be determined through reason. In contrast, early Buddhism presented a radical theory of impermanence. Interpreters of early Buddhism have been unable to abandon the presupposition of permanence, however, and hence have persisted in viewing nirvana or freedom as a permanent and eternal state to be contrasted with the impermanent world of sensory experience and bondage. Ethics in Early Buddhism is David J. Kalupahana's balanced and brilliantly concise attempt to place the early Buddhist descriptions of the world of experience, the state of freedom, and the moral principle leading to such freedom within the framework of impermanence.

Taking a comparative approach which considers characters that are shared across the narrative traditions of early Indian religions (Brahmanical Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism) Shared Characters in Jain, Buddhist and Hindu Narrative explores key religious and social ideals, as well as points of contact, dialogue and contention between different worldviews. The book focuses on three types of character - gods, heroes and kings - that are of particular importance to early South Asian narrative traditions because of their relevance to the concerns of the day, such as the role of deities, the qualities of a true hero or good ruler and the tension between worldly responsibilities and the pursuit of liberation. Characters (incuding character roles and lineages of characters) that are shared between traditions reveal both a common narrative heritage and important differences in worldview and ideology that are developed in interaction with other worldviews and ideologies of the day. As such, this study sheds light on an important period of Indian religious history, and will be essential reading for scholars and postgraduate students working on early South Asian religious or narrative traditions (Jain, Buddhist and Hindu) as well as being of interest more widely in the fields of Religious Studies, Classical Indology, Asian Studies and Literary Studies.