ABSTRACT
The omniscient Jina states that purity of business activity is the basis of dharma. The Jains are community of between five and ten million people, concentrated in India but with Diaspora communities in eastern and southern Africa, North America, Europe and Oceania. Jain Dharma is a culture and an aesthetic sensibility, a sense of perspective on individual, society and the world based on long-term thinking and an understanding of the universe as vast, eternal and cyclical. This chapter presents an overview of Jain culture and concepts behind it, with an emphasis on the creative tension between the ideal of reducing consumption and system of values conventionally associated with business practice. It focuses on learning how to 'think like a Jain'. In an unusually direct account of the Jain jewellery business, its history and culture, the Jaipur entrepreneur Jyoti Kothari, owner of Vardhaman Gems, described to Jain Spirit magazine the way in which the industry is still based on workshop-centred craftsmanship.
