ABSTRACT
In the religious tradition of Jainism, mendicants—Jain monks and nuns—are not permitted to travel by mechanical means. This has been a factor in maintaining India as the epicentre of the tradition, and has contributed to a feeling and perception of disconnection between lay Jains that have settled outside of the South-Asian heartland and the mendicant community. However, recent fieldwork in different Jain diaspora communities reveals how the physical and mediated presence of Jain mendicant and mendicant-like figures in the lives of Jains overseas is not all that rare. Starting from a lunch-time encounter with a Jain monk in Atlanta, The Sadhu Who Came for Lunch provides a typology of lay–mendicant contact in the diaspora, interrogates the common expectation of a radical mendicant absence outside of South Asia, and proposes a vernacular religion approach to accommodate the variety of practices and multiplicity of understandings that underlie religion as it is lived.
