While Western Jain scholarship has focused on those texts and practices favoring male participation, the Jain community itself relies heavily on lay women's participation for religious education, the performance of key rituals, and the locus of religious knowledge. In this fieldwork-based study, Whitney Kelting attempts to reconcile these women's understanding of Jainism with the religion as presented in the existing scholarship. Jain women, she shows, both accept
and rewrite the idealized roles received from religious texts, practices, and social expectation, according to which female religiosity is a symbol of Jain perfection. Jain women's worship shows us a Jainism focused more on devotion than on philosophy. With rituals structured around singing hymns,
Jain women negotiate hybrid theologies that sometimes conflict with normative Jainism. Singing to the Jinas describes these women's interpretations of their religion, not as folklore or popular religion, but as a theology that recreates Jainism in a form which honors their own participation.
- ISBN10 0195140117
- ISBN13 9780195140118
- Publish Date 30 August 2001 (first published 1 January 2001)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 288
- Language English