DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN JAINA MONASTICISM

The study of Jainism as a living religion is still hampered by a lack of reliable sociological and demographic information both on the Jain laity and Jain mendicants.1 Most empirical studies to date have been thematically oriented or were of an exploratory nature. They were based on the methods advanced by the classical anthropological village studies or on small surveys of a non-representative nature.2 In both cases, the units of investigation were defined in terms of observer categories3 which were often created ad hoc in the field due to the advantages of snowball sampling under conditions of limited resources. In a paper read at the American Oriental Society Meeting in 1978, at a time when comprehensive field studies had yet to be conducted, the late Kendall Folkert (1993: 156) suggested avoiding the inevitable abstractions of ‘general accounts of the Jains ’ by concentrating on ‘the smaller divisions within the tradition’ which ‘have actually been the basic units of the tradition’. What Folkert had in mind was to study the individual ‘schools, sects or orders ’ (gaccha) of the Jain mendicant tradition,4 rather than ‘Jain religious culture ’ in general.5 Certainly, not all Jains coalesce around monastic groups, but the majority does so in one way or another. The investigation of categories which are recognised by the Jains themselves promises indeed to yield testable results of greater accuracy and relevance for the Jain community itself. However, the research programme envisaged by Folkert has yet to be implemented.6 Despite the pioneering studies of Vilas Sangave (1959/1980) on the social divisions of the Jain lay community and of Muni Uttam Kamal Jain (1975) on the pre-modern history of the religious divisions of the Jain mendicants, most students of Jainism, and indeed most Jains, have still no way of knowing how many independent mendicant orders exist today and how they are organised.7 The aim of this chapter is to fill this gap and to provide a brief overview of the present schools, orders and sects8 within both the Fvetambara- and the Digambara-denomination9 and to bring together the available demographic data on the current Jain monastic traditions