Framing the Jina

Download or read book Framing the Jina written by John Cort and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-21 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Through an insightful study of Jain narratives ranging over fifteen hundred years, John Cort explores the imaginative ways in which Jains have explained the presence of icons of hundreds of thousands of Jina icons in temples throughout India. A majority of Jain narratives revere and celebrate the icons, and so justifiy their existence. Narratives originating among iconoclastic Jain communities, however, perceive the existence of temple icons as troubling signs of decay and corruption. These alternative narratives view them as false idols, not holy icons." "Cort examines in detail the most significant pro- and anti-icon narratives. Some narratives take the form of histories of the origins and spread of icons; others consist of cosmological descriptions, depicting a vast universe filled with eternal Jain icons. Cort even delves into psychological explanations of the presence of the icons, in which icons are defended as necessary spiritual corollaries to the very fact of human physicality." --Book Jacket.