Jainism is well known as a radically ascetic strategy for achieving liberation from the world''s bondage. It is less well known as a system of religious belief and practice embedded in social life. This article will examine Jainism as a symbolism of social identity. At the center of my inquiry is a puzzling cultural fact, the seemingly paradoxical claim by many nonviolent Jains to be descended from warlike Rājpūts. Despite its extreme emphasis on ascetic withdrawal from the world, Jainism is, as I hope to show, deeply implicated in the worldly identity of certain social groups and even can function as a kind of origin myth for these groups. Understanding how this is possible requires a considerable departure from the usual perspective on Jainism. The ascetic is normally the center of attention in Jain studies. This article, however, will give equal attention to a figure less frequently considered. This is the warrior-king.

Let us imagine a graceful bronze image of Dancing Śiva before us. It was perhaps created by a Cola artist in eleventh-century Tamilnad to be installed in a temple to receive offerings of worship, and to parade around the town in a ceremonial palanquin on festival days. From there, this image might have followed any of several paths to stand before us now in a North American museum. Perhaps it was buried under a banyan tree in the fourteenth century when invading Islamic armies, feared for their iconoclasm, marched through the Kaveri delta on their way to Madurai. It could have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, during British rule, by a Tamil workman on a road crew, who showed it to the civil engineer, who brought it to the attention of the District Collector, who passed it on to the Director of Archaeology. In the twentieth century, perhaps, when an international market developed for such objects, it might have ended up in an auction room, a cosmic dance sold to the highest bidder. Or a government expert on culture might have selected it, after its long hibernation in the basement storehouse of its temple, as an image worthy to travel abroad as an ambassador of independent India in the international diplomatics of traveling exhibitions.

When buddhist institutions directed their efforts to the evangelization of the common people during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1192–1573), they met a set of popular beliefs that were deeply entrenched in the lives of their new audience. In spite of local variations in the names of the deities worshiped and in the details of ritual performances, a series of “defiling” practices that were perceived as dangerous taboos (imi) provided Japanese worshipers with a common denominator that transcended geographic, linguistic, and time boundaries.

Sui-tang luoyang, built IN 605–6 as the eastern capital of the Sui dynasty and subsequently the eastern capital of the Tang dynasty, was one of the great cities of medieval China. Almost as soon as it was built to the taste of Emperor Sui Yangdi (r. 604–17), Luoyang became the second largest city in China, surpassed only by Daxingcheng-Chang'an, the first capital, which had been built by Yangdi's father. Both cities were objects of scholarly interest as early as the eighth century when, in 722, Wei Shu completed his Liangjing xinji [A new record of the two capitals] (Fukuyama Toshio).

Dream of the red chamber has been analyzed and reanalyzed by thousands of Chinese commentators in the more than two centuries since it was written (e.g., Yu 1923; Hu 1940; Zhou 1953; He 1956; Liu 1956; Jiang 1959; Wu 1961; Wang 1983). Indeed, entire journals are devoted exclusively to the novel's analysis, and strictly original contributions to this vast literature are rare. However, Meng Zhang's comparison of the genealogical relations of the principal characters of the novel with Eugene Cooper's ethnographic data on twentieth-century Zhejiang, and the joint analysis of the results are informed by an anthropological consciousness uncommon to previous commentators. The analysis not only takes note of patterns of cousin marriage recognized by earlier commentators (e.g., Yu 1923; Zhou 1953; Wu 1961), but also discovers instances of several of the more obscure patterns noted by Cooper in his Zhejiang materials (Cooper, in press).