CLU is a new University formed by Claremont School of Theology (CST). Established in 1885, CST is an institution of The United Methodist Church, situated in Southern California among the prestigious Claremont Colleges. CST is a respected institution for studies of Christianity,  and Judaism and Islam have been added under the auspices of Claremont Lincoln..  The school received a $50 million donation from the Lincoln family of Arizona to start a program for world religions and in May 2011, CLU was born.  The first religion CLU chose to partner with is the Jain dharma.

CLU is a one-of-a-kind academic institution that welcomes partners from all religious and ethical traditions and they have begun their journey by partnering with the International School of Jain Studies (ISJS) in India. Over the last seven years, six Claremont students have gone to India to study the Jain dharma at ISJS. At the initiative of one of these six students, who is now pursuing her doctoral studies at Claremont, Jain studies has become an integral part of the CLU by establishment of  “ISJS at Claremont Lincoln University”. This alliance is further strengthened by a separate letter of understanding between JAINA and CLU in which JAINA has pledged its full support to the establishment of a Jain studies program.

The understanding between ISJS and CLU is very ambitious and has 20 action items in it but for now the following three will be put on fast track:

1.     Offer the first course on Jain dharma in the Fall of 2012,

2.     Holding an annual international seminar on Jain dharma at Claremont campus where Jain scholars and academics from all over the world will be invited to present research papers, and

3.     Establish distance education programs for Jain studies. This initiative is expected to be “Open Source,” meaning it will be available to anyone, anywhere and at any time.

The festivities of September 6 at Claremont were dignified and were a harbinger of great things to come in the near future. The stage was decorated with two large framed Jain art paintings, scores of Jain books donated by Jains of North America and a tall brass lamp. In attendance were President Dr. Jerry Campbell, Provost Dr. Philip Clayton, Mr. and Mrs. David Lincoln, many faculty members and invited guests of Claremont School of Theology, ISJS Director Dr. Shugan Jain, a large delegation of members of the Jain Center of Southern California headed by Rajen Dhami, three Past Presidents of JAINA Dr. Sulekh Jain, Kirit Daftary and Dilip Shah.  The auspicious event began with Manglacharn by Pramodaben Chitrabhanu. Dr. Christopher Chapple made the opening remarks; Dr. Sulekh Jain spoke of ISJS and JAINA at Claremont Lincoln University before the lamp lighting ceremony with the image of Goddess Sarswati in the background.

Rabbi Mel Gottlieb gave the Jain community a warm welcome and Rajen Dhami (Trustee of JCSC and Vice President of JAINA) noted the importance of the new initiative and presented mementos from JCSC to Mr. David Lincoln who thanked and welcomed the Jains.  ISJS alumna Amanda Pumhery spoke about the Jain symbol of the raised hand and Tim Helton talked about the art of giving.

Dr. Shugan Jain spoke next about the philosophy of ISJS and hopes for the alliance between ISJS and CLU. He presented specially created scarves for the event to President Jerry Campbell, Provost Philip Clayton, Chair of Board Mr. David Lincoln, CFO Lynn O’Leary-Archer and Brianne Donaldson Chair of Jain Exploratory Committee at Claremont Lincoln. The traditional ceremony of yoking symbolizes joining together and pairing of ISJS and Claremont of Lincoln was thus formalized.

Dr. John Cobb spoke of plurality, practice and possibilities as we go forward. Dilip Shah spoke of the future plans and marveled at the commitment of Claremont Lincoln to initiate distance learning studies of Jainism. President Dr Campbell gave a heart-warming speech and appreciation for this new beginning.

The concluding remarks were by Brianne Donaldson, special assistant to the Provost and Chair of Jain Exploratory Committee at Claremont Lincoln. Her perspective on the Goddess Sarswati image that was on the screen during the ceremony was indeed a moving experience for all present.

The Jain ceremony was followed by the convocation ceremony of CST that included Pramodaben Chitrabhanu singing Maitri Bhavnu Pavitra Jharnu.

Afterwards, all the guests and Claremont faculty were served a vegetarian lunch on the lawn where vegan menu was also provided.

For more information:

This article courtesy: Dilip V Shah,  Past President Jaina

Claremont School of Theology: www.cst.edu

Claremont Lincoln University: www.ClaremontLincoln.org.

International School of Jain Studies: www.jainstudies.org

Jain Ceremony at Claremont Lincoln University of September 6, 2011   http://vimeo.com/29288663

Beginning in the summer of 2011 and going forward, this interdisciplinary program will enable 6-8 fellows to pursue research in residence at Wesleyan University at the College of the Environment. Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut is a selective private, coeducational, non-sectarian school of liberal arts and sciences known for the excellence of its academic and co-curricular programs.  Wesleyan’s College of the Environment was created in 2009 with a belief in the resilience of the human spirit and a desire to engage students and scholars in discussions about environmental issues and their social and political impact.

The fellowship will be hosted by Wesleyan faculty Lori Gruen and Kari Weil. Gruen is chair and associate professor of philosophy, associate professor of environmental studies, associate professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan, and author of Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, Feb. 2011). Weil is a visiting professor of letters at Wesleyan, and author of Thinking Animals: An Introduction (Columbia, 2011).

The fellowship is designed to support recipients’ individual research through mentorship, guest lectures, and scholarly exchange among fellows and opportunities to contribute to the intellectual life of the host institution.  All fellows must be in continuous residence for the duration of the program, May 23 – July 1, inclusive.

The fellowships are open to scholars from any discipline investigating a topic related to human-animal relationships. Selected topics from previous years’ programs include:

• Analyzing one County’s Attempt to go “No Kill”
• Animal Ethics in Cold War Literary Culture
• Animal Experimentation and Animal Welfare in Twentieth Century Anglo-American Science
• Animal Research in Theory and Practice
• Animals and Colonialism
• Cloning Extinct Species of Mammals
• Ethics and Politics in Environmental Discourse in India
• Gender Relations in Cattle Ranching
• Genetically Engineered Pigs
• Human Animal Relationships at the Duke Lemur Center
• Inter-species Identity and Alterity in a Video Game
• Legal Personhood, Animal Advocacy, and Human-Animal Relationships
• Literary Representations of Dogs
• Media Representations of the 2007 Pet Food Recall
• Science and Policies Affecting Elephants in Captivity
• The Animal Rights Movements in France and the United States
• The Human-Animal Relationship for Veterinary Students
• Victorian Quaker Women’s Contributions to Feminist-Animal Ethics
• Xenotransplantation and Black Market Organs

Application deadline: January 15, 2011

Amount of Award

Scholars selected to participate in the fellowship program will be awarded a stipend of $3,000 to help cover travel costs, housing, living expenses, books, and other research expenses.  The Wesleyan hosts will help coordinate housing for the fellows.

Eligibility

Applicants must (1) possess a Ph.D., J.D., M.S.W. or equivalent, or be a doctoral student at the dissertation stage; (2) have a commitment to advancing research in Human-Animal Studies; (3) be actively engaged, during the fellowship program, in a research project that culminates in a journal article, book, or other scholarly presentation, and (4) submit a follow-up report six months after the fellowship’s completion.

Application

Applicants should email electronic copies of the following items to fellowshipapplication@animalsandsociety.org:

• Cover sheet with the applicant’s name, mailing address to be used for future correspondence, telephone and fax numbers, e-mail address, present rank and institution name, date Ph.D. or J.D. or M.S.W. received or expected, citizenship status, title of project, history of fellowships and grants received during the past five years.
• One paragraph abstract
• Project proposal of up to three pages (single-spaced) that describes the project and indicates work completed on the project to date.  As the description will be considered by a panel of scholars from a variety of disciplines, it should be written for non-specialists.
• Curriculum vitae of up to three pages.
• Two letters of recommendation (pdfs of original letters recommended)
• Applicants are responsible for contacting referees and supplying them with a description of the project.

Selection Process

The selection committee includes members from a range of disciplines connected to Human-Animal Studies.

Applications are evaluated on the contribution that the completed project will make to Human-Animal Studies, the qualifications of the applicant to complete the research, and how well the applicant’s project complements the other projects. In addition, we favor projects that include policy and practice implications.

Applicants will be notified by e-mail and letter March 2011.

The fellowship program will be directed by Ken Shapiro, Executive Director of Animals and Society Institute, Margo DeMello, Program Director, Human Animal Studies Program, and Wesleyan professors Lori Gruen, and Kari Weil. Please address all correspondence to us at the following address:

Committee on FellowshipsAnimals & Society Institute
403 McCauley Street
Washington Grove MD 20880

fellowshipapplication@animalsandsociety.org

301-963-4751

www.animalsandsociety.org

Margo DeMelloProgram Director,
Human-Animal StudiesAnimals and Society Institute2
512 Carpenter Rd,
Suite 201A2
Ann Arbor, MI 48108
734-677-9240

www.animalsandsociety.org
www.Facebook.com/AnimalsandSocietyInstitute
Check out Teaching the Animal

November 13, 2009
New York Times | Art Reviews | ‘Victorious Ones,’ ‘Peaceful Conquerors’

Compassionate Masters of the Universe

By HOLLAND COTTER

First, do no harm. That’s the bottom-line rule of Jainism, one of the three major homegrown religions in India. To believers, all living things, from whales to humans to flu bugs, have souls and, karmically speaking, all souls are equal. If you go thrashing and stomping your way through the average day, as most of us do, you’re bound to be injuring something. And if you injure something, you injure everything, including yourself. This is how karma works. So it pays to move with care.

Mohandas Gandhi, who used nonviolence as a political tool, learned a lot from the Jains. But in the West we still know little about them and even less about their art — brilliant little narrative paintings, sculptures of sleek nude saviors — which we tend to misidentify as Buddhist. Not that there’s much around to see. The last major American survey was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994, and it never came to the East Coast. Scant Jain material is on regular view in New York museums.

This fall, however, brings two Jain shows to New York: “Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection” at the Rubin Museum of Art and “Peaceful Conquerors: Jain Manuscript Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neither show is as spectacular as the Los Angeles exhibition, although the Rubin Museum one approaches it. Together they provide an in-depth survey of a great art tradition and a complex faith that has nearly five million followers in India.

And I do mean complex. For all its clear-cut ethical thinking, Jainism has a highly contradictory view of the world. On the one hand, it envisions the cosmos as a precision machine, with balanced realms of heaven and hell sandwiching a thin slice of earth, and time measured out in regular and recurrent epochs of bloom and decay.

Yet creatures living in those epochs experience tremendous uncertainty. This is particularly true in periods of disintegration, one of which, by Jain reckoning, we are in now, with no end yet in sight. Violence will continue to grow. Beast will turn on beast. Hell will outweigh heaven. Is there any sound reality to rely on?

There is, in the form of the transcendent beings known as jinas, or victors, for whom Jainism is named. They appear, 24 in all, in every epoch. The enemy they’ve conquered, through eons of self-discipline, is themselves, or rather human passions: fear, aggression, love, what have you. As a result they’ve reached the end of the karmic line, where bloom and decay end, and truth — unvarying, imponderable, and probably as plain as the nose on your face — waits.

The Jina nearest to our own time was named Mahavira. An older contemporary of the Buddha, he lived in northern India in the sixth century B.C. His life is the subject of several exquisite manuscript paintings at the Met, selected from the museum’s permanent collection by John Guy, the curator of South and Southeast Asian art.

The story these works tell begins with a prenatal mix-up: the future Jina, though expected to be of royal birth, has been conceived by a nonroyal Brahman couple. The error is soon finessed by the miraculous transfer of the foetus to the womb of a Jain queen, an event depicted with wide-eyed, almost comical verve in a tiny 15th-century manuscript painting from western India, long a Jain stronghold.

In other illustrations we see the infant Mahavira born, bathed and coddled. Then, in a flash forward, he’s a bejewelled young sovereign being carried in procession to the edge of a forest. There he strips off his princely gear, plucks out his hair by the roots and, naked or near naked, sets out on a final earthly journey. In a culminating image he stands on the moon, a kind of superman, preaching truth to the cosmos.

By this point he exists outside our sphere, as all jinas do. He’s superhuman, beyond access, deaf to our appeals. Still, the paintings of his life, even this one of him on the moon, look almost warm to the touch, with their jazzy color combos of crimson, gold and ultramarine ground and their naturalistic details: transparent fabrics, pretty flowers and wasp-waisted bodies striking Ruth St. Denis poses.

There are more such paintings in the Rubin Museum show, and other kinds too: half-abstract geometric designs; elaborately plotted cosmograms; and pilgrimage road maps teeming with minute human and animal figures that move, like ants through the earth, toward gilded jinas glowing in shrines.

These images depicted are, presumably sculptures, and sculpture is, for me, the high point of Jain art. You’ll find a handful of superb examples at the Met, including the big marble jina, snow white and ultra serene, that has become a kind of mascot for the South Asian galleries. But the Rubin show has many more: nearly three dozen carved and cast figures, from hand size to life size. Dating from the 5th to the 17th century, they add up to a primer of sculptural types.

The types seem, at a glance, fairly limited. Most sculptures made for temples or home altars were of single male figures seated in yogic meditation or standing attentively upright, legs straight, sapling-smooth arms hanging down at their sides, hands shaped like big, bizarre flowers and empty. Some of the jinas wear sheer robes; others are nude, in which case they are associated with the Jain sect called Digambara, or sky-clad, meaning dressed in nothing but air.

Digambara ascetics and teachers — though not ordinary worshipers — completely renounce possessions, including clothing. They are, you might say, career nudists, living out an extreme version of the injunction to exist as no-impact presences in the material world. As if in a defiant gesture of total disarmament, they render themselves as unprotected as the most vulnerable of organisms.

Nudity has an ethical downside: women are barred from practicing it and are spiritually considered second-class citizens. But visually it is the feature that most clearly distinguishes Jain from much other South Asian art, including Buddhist, with which it is often confused. The misidentification is understandable. Over the centuries the two faiths coexisted as more or less friendly rivals. The same artists made images for both; and those images shared period and regional styles.

The main differences are doctrinal. While the religions share the primary goal of helping individuals escape the trauma of repeated births and deaths, they take varying approaches to it: measured and moderate in the case of Buddhism, severe and self-punishing in the case of certain Jain practice. Also, Buddhists didn’t believe in the existence of eternal souls, but Jains do, which gives their commitment to nonviolence — called ahimsa — a particularly ardent edge.

This is not to suggest that Jains were, or are, a population of renunciates. Historically adept at integrating into society, successful as merchants and traders, they often aligned themselves with the highest sources of political power and led luxurious lives. The jinas represented ideals of moral perfection, admirable, but basically inimitable. Thanks to art, you could see them — adamant in their simplicity, at once present and absent, almost innocent of charm — but you knew you could not be them.

What you can be is fully human and, in the karmic scheme of things, with so many souls in so many forms streaming through eternity, that’s an achievement in itself, or possibly just the luck of the draw. In any case, it comes with pleasures — spicy, sprightly paintings among them — and with obligations: first, to make peace with both absolutism and uncertainty; next to see all your fellow creatures for the companion souls they are; and last, which is also first in that circling Jain plan, to do no harm, no harm.

“Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection” runs through Feb. 15 at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, Manhattan; (212) 620-5000; rmanyc.org. “Peaceful Conquerors: Jain Manuscript Painting” runs through March 28 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

 Courtesy: New York Tmes

Please take the following steps to access and download these files:

1.  Go to www.jaineLibrary.org  website.

2.  Register yourself  on the web site. 

3.  After the completion of registration – log in with your registered
     e-mail address and your password.

4.  On Home Page – click the link “Jain Audio/Stavan/Vidhi/Sutra”

5.  On the link result page click “Pratikraman” link

6.  On the result page – go to the last column (Book Download column)
and click mp3 symbol and use save the file option. 

(Do not Open the file on the Website.  It will not work because the file size is too large)
7.  After downloading all six files on your local computer – play one file at a time for Samvatsari Pratikraman Ritual.

This new website contains all Jaina Education Committee Pathsala Books (pdf files) and more than 2000 books of reference Jain literature.

If you need any assistance in downloading please send email to :
education@jaina.org

Jaina Education Committee must be congratulated on the excellent service being provided to the Jain community utlising the modern technology.

After you have visited the site and perhaps downloaded the Pratikram tracks or looked at the reference books and have any comments, please feel free to make them on this page.

 

Jain Centre of Greater Phoenix

The Jain community of Greater Phoenix conducted dedication ceremonies with full rituals for its magnificent temple from 20^th to 26^th December.  The dedication was attended by over a thousand devotees who had travelled from all over the world. Several eminent Jains from India had travelled specially to attend the dedication.