This volume consists of ten papers from the first‐ever panel on Jaina Studies at the triennial Deutsche Orientalistentag, or German Oriental Studies Congress, at its thirty‐first meeting in 2010. Two essays deal with important historical laymen: Ṭ. Pherū, a Jain assayer at the fourteenth‐century mint of the Khaljī Sultans; and K. Vacchāvat, a sixteenth‐century Oswal merchant and political minister, active in Akbar's court in Lahore, whose family for generations had supported the Kharatara Gaccha lineage of Śvetāmbara monks. Four essays address Jaina epistemology, including the doctrines of syādvāda and anekāntavāda from a Buddhist perspective; a Jaina critique of Vaiśeṣika; Jaina conceptions of erroneous cognition; and an argument that syādvāda is not meant to apply to the Jinas’ omniscience. One essay looks at the development of the havelī style of Jaina temple architecture in late‐medieval north India. Three essays explore literary topics: a drama included in Śīlāṅka's ninth‐century Prakrit novel Caupaṇṇamahāpurisacariya; ways that the c. fifth‐century Prakrit Vasudevahiṇḍī of Saṅghadāsa used material from the Bṛhatkathā to relay edifying stories and the Jaina universal history; and Jinabhadra's fifth‐ to sixth‐century cosmological treatise Bṛhatsaṃgrahaṇī together with the commentary on it by the twelfth‐century Malayagiri. These specialist studies represent the finest of European (with one Japanese addition) Jainological scholarship, and the volume belongs in all research libraries.
