Idol Worshipers and Their Critics

FAIN: FB-50335-04

John E. Cort
Denison University (Granville, OH 43023-1100)

This project is a book-length manuscript on discourses, ritual practices, and attitudes concerning the appropriateness of religious temple images within the Jain tradition of South Asia. Portions of this research have been presented in conference papers and printed articles, and I have a detailed outline of the projected book. Funding would allow me freedom from the heavy teaching responsibilities of a small liberal arts college in order to finish the manuscript. The book will contribute to the specific field of Jain studies, more broadly to our understanding of the religious history of South Asia, and most broadly to an enhanced understanding of the tensions and contestations at the intersection of art and religion. While it is important to understand how religion and art have overlapped and reinforced each other throughout history, the power of this connection is fully perceived only when we recognize that throughout many people have also critiqued the connection as problematic and even fundamentally wrong.

Media Coverage

untitled review (Review)
Author(s): Lisa N. Owen
Publication: Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 70, no. 1 (Feb 2011), pp. 271-73
Date: 12/21/2011

untitled review (Review)
Author(s): Lawrence A. Babb
Publication: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 79, no. 3 (Sept 2011), pp. 747-50
Date: 12/21/2011

Associated Products

Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (Book)
Title: Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History
Author: John E. Cort
Abstract: (publisher's blurb:) John Cort explores the narratives by which the Jains have explained the presence of icons of Jinas (their enlightened and liberated teachers) that are worshiped and venerated in the hundreds of thousands of Jain temples throughout India. Most of these narratives portray icons favorably, and so justify their existence; but there are also narratives originating among iconoclastic Jain communities that see the existence of temple icons as a sign of decay and corruption. The veneration of Jina icons is one of the most widespread of all Jain ritual practices. Nearly every Jain community in India has one or more elaborate temples, and as the Jains become a global community there are now dozens of temples in North America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia. The cult of temples and icons goes back at least two thousand years, and indeed the largest of the four main subdivisions of the Jains are called Murtipujakas, or "Icon Worshipers." A careful reading of narratives ranging over the past 15 centuries, says Cort, reveals a level of anxiety and defensiveness concerning icons, although overt criticism of the icons only became explicit in the last 500 years. He provides detailed studies of the most important pro- and anti-icon narratives. Some are in the form of histories of the origins and spread of icons. Others take the form of cosmological descriptions, depicting a vast universe filled with eternal Jain icons. Finally, Cort looks at more psychological explanations of the presence of icons, in which icons are defended as necessary spiritual corollaries to the very fact of human embodiedness.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/OtherReligions/?view=usa&ci=9780195385021
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780195385021

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