Abstract
While strong religious identity is often associated with violence, Jainism, one of the world’s oldest practiced religions, is often regarded as one of the most peaceful religions and has nevertheless persisted through history. In this article, I am arguing that one of the reasons for this persistence is the community’s strategy of dialogic identity construction. The teaching of anekāntavāda allows Jainas to both engage with other views constructively and to maintain a coherent sense of self. The article presents an overview of this mechanism in different contexts from the debates of classical Indian philosophy to contemporary associations of anekāntavāda with science. Central to the argument is the observation that anekāntavāda is in all these contexts used to stabilize Jaina identity, and that anekāntavāda should therefore not be interpreted as a form of relativism.
Highlights
Religious Identity and the Dialogic Uses of AnekāntavādaWithin the debate on the role of religion in public life, strong religious identity is often and controversially discussed within the context of violent extremism.1 Strong religion, as in the title of a book by Gabriel A
Historical reality is always more complex, as for example the biography of King Kharavela shows (Singh 2017, p. 252ff), the study of Jainism and its practices of self-representation and identity formation can offer an interesting counter-example to the usual association of strong or passionate religious identity with violence
Jainas to hold an inherently dialogic identity that is strong enough to unify the community through time and allow for the persistence of Jainism, yet open enough to include the perspectives of the other as well, diffusing potential causes for conflict
Summary
Within the debate on the role of religion in public life, strong religious identity is often and controversially discussed within the context of violent extremism. Strong religion, as in the title of a book by Gabriel A. Jainas to hold an inherently dialogic identity that is strong enough to unify the community through time and allow for the persistence of Jainism, yet open enough to include the perspectives of the other as well, diffusing potential causes for conflict.. My argument will be that anekāntavāda allows Jainas to open up to other discourses from complex philosophy to religious tolerance to empirical science, while allowing them to strengthen their own standpoint, which remains in its fundamentals unchanged and non-negotiable. Religions 2019, 10, 642 identity of many Jainas is dialogic in so far as they reject violence unconditionally but define themselves explicitly through their openness to the many perspectives any matter truly has and which might be brought in by conversation partners who hold quite different world views. (Baghramian and Carter 2019), as Jainas can hold unconditional truth claims about a normative reality that can be defended authoritatively
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