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Sarada Devi, more widely known as the holy mother Sarada Devi, was born on Dec 22, 1853, and died on Jul 21, 1920, having spent much of her life in the village of her birth, Jayrambati. She was the wife and spiritual companion of the Bengali saint and spiritual leader Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. She became a spiritual leader in her own right after the passing of her husband in 1886, likely having more followers in the course of her lifetime than her husband had during his.…

Śrāvakācāra is a genre of Jain literature, composed chiefly by Jain ascetics, that outlines the behavioral expectations of the ideal Jain layperson. Though the term śrāvakācāra is primarily found in the Digambara Jain tradition, texts of this kind have been authored by ascetics in both the Digambara and the Śvetāmbara traditions for roughly two thousand years.1 It could be posited that this literature is an extension of the common Jain practice in which ascetics, serving as preceptors or guru…

Modern Science and the Discourse of Jain Neo-OrthodoxyLike most religious communities, Jains have res­ponded in a variety of creative ways to the phenomenon of modernity, and to the rise of modern science in particular. P. Dundas defines three basic modes of thought and practice that predominate in contemporary Jainism. These modes do not map in any easy or obvious way onto sectarian divisions, nor are they always explicitly seen by Jains themselves as distinct ways of being Jain, or defined using the …