both of commentaries and secular works. The most eminent of
their authors is Hemacandra, born in 1088, who though a monk was an
ornament of the court and rendered an important service to his sect by
converting Kumarapala, King of Gujarat. He composed numerous and
valuable works on grammar, lexicography, poetics and ecclesiastical
biography. Such subjects were congenial to the later Jain writers and
they not only cultivated both Sanskrit and Prakrit but also had a
vivifying effect on the vernaculars of southern India. Kanarese, Tamil,
and Telugu in their literary form owe much to the labours of Jain monks,
and the Jain works composed in these languages, such as the
Jivakacintamani in Tamil, if not of world-wide importance, at least
greatly influenced Dravidian civilization.

Though the Jains thus occupy an honourable, and even distinguished place
in the history of letters it must be confessed that it is hard to praise
their older religious books. This literature is of considerable
scientific interest for it contains many data about ancient India as yet
unsifted but it is tedious in style and rarely elevated in sentiment. It
has an arid extravagance, which merely piles one above the other
interminable lists of names and computations of immensity in time and
space. Even more than in the Buddhist suttas there is a tendency to
repetition which offends our sense of proportion and though the main
idea, to free the soul from the trammels of passion and matter, is not
inferior to any of the religious themes of India, the treatment is not
adequate to the subject and the counsels of perfection are smothered
under a mass of minute precepts about the most unsavoury details of life
and culminate in the recommendation of death by voluntary starvation.

5

But observation of Jainism as it exists to-day produces a quite
different impression. The Jains are well-to-do, industrious and
practical: their schools and religious establishments are well ordered:
their temples have a beauty, cleanliness, and cheerfulness unusual in
India and due to the large use made of white marble and brilliant
colours. The tenderness for animal life may degenerate into superstition
(though surely it is a fault on the right side) and some observances of
the ascetics (such as pulling out the hair instead of shaving the head)
are severe, but as a community the Jains lead sane and serious lives,
hardly practising and certainly not parading the extravagances of