ABSTRACT
Jainism attained during the twentieth century a reputation as a religion that envisages all alternative viewpoints as having access to some at least partial version of the truth. Many Jains of a liberal and ecumenical disposition continue to regard irenicism as a significant component of their religiocultural identity. What an observer from a non-involved background might have benignly concluded as appearing to be little more than varying degrees of harmless nonconformity or heterodoxy were for the Jain polemicists pernicious enactments of false belief. By the time of the emergence of the Tapa Gaccha, there were already a variety of gacchas in western India promoting interpretations of Jain practice which frequently proved controversial to their Svetambara coreligionists. The ‘concealer of the doctrine’, on the other hand, does not abandon his deviance even at the moment of death and refuses to respond to the urgings of the Jain community.
