ABSTRACT
Reform is on the face of it a convenient enough rubric under which to group the various attempts which have taken place within the Jain community over the last thousand years or so to re-establish, generally on the basis of textual authority, a pure brand of Jainism. However, the Hindi and Gujarati term uddhår, which is often seen as the equivalent of English ‘reform’, signifies literally ‘a raising up’ (it can also be used to describe the restoration of a ruined temple) and is employed by sympathetic Jain writers in the sense both of a retrieval and reactivation of a basic doctrine of non-violence and renunciation taught by Mahåv⁄ra and a concomitant rejection of what are regarded as the debased practices which attend this particular period of the world era. The word ‘reform’, with its connotation of refashioning an existing structure, is scarcely adequate to convey the radical nature of what the monks and laymen to be described in this chapter felt they were doing, namely cutting away the accretions of sectarianism and false practice to lay bare in its stark and simple grandeur a ‘true’ Jainism situated outside the exigencies of historical time and social circumstance.1
