ABSTRACT
No religious tradition should be reduced to a simple set of basic principles; nor, however congenial it might be to philological research, should an attempt be made to situate the complete essence of a religion in the words of some putative founder, both because it is usually extremely problematic to make objective decisions about what a founder actually said and because religions are obviously highly complex interlocking patterns of practice and belief which ultimately elude fixed categorisation. So, while we may be confident that the Jain scriptures preserve some reasonably accurate account of the content and style of Mahåv⁄ra’s teachings, the literal words of the fordmaker cannot be retrieved, a fact that is of no concern to Jains since, to them, Mahåv⁄ra’s teachings and the way Jainism, of whatever sect, manifests itself today are one and the same. Nonetheless, Jainism does have a history, even though its doctrinal component became stabilised at a relatively early date, and it is necessary to inspect the ancient texts to see what light they throw on the earliest phase of Jain teachings.
