Output details
33 - Theology and Religious Studies
School of Oriental and African Studies
Askese und Devotion. Das rituelle System der Terāpanth Śvetāmbara Jains
This is the first comprehensive historical-ethnographical study of a Jaina mendicant order and its following. Based on textual sources and intermittent fieldwork in India 1988-1992, the work traces the development of the distinctive ritual system of the Terāpanth from 1760 through a series of cumulative reforms. It demonstrates in exemplary manner how the presumably ‘static’ Jaina tradition evolves and changes through historical agency. To account for these new data, the study proposes to replace the Anthropological and Indological standard model of the interaction of text and practice qua value-realisation with a theory of tradition as an autopoietic system.