Worshipping the Ideal King: On the Social Implications of Medieval Jaina Conversion Stories

Flügel, Peter

Abstract

The article argues that not only Jaina poetic fiction, but also the genres of Jain history, even ‘plain’ chronologies, are shaped by the imperatives of religious pragmatics. It demonstrates how through the rhetorical device of ‘communicative self-reference’, where a text points at its own communicative context, a variety of different Jaina narrative genres can function as conversion stories. A standard feature of Jain narratives is that the listener to a religious discourse frquently finds him/herself in a conventional speech situation, a sermon for instance, which mirrors the narrative frame in the text, and thus facilitates identification with the conversion experiences and soteriological trajectories typically highlighted in Jains texts. The article offers a solution for the conundrum of the frequent tropes of violence in Jaina stories by arguing that these are deliberately used to force conversational implicatures on the listener for the purpose of evoking experiences of religious insight, through techniques of defamiliarization, displacement, and the violation of expectations.

Citation

Flügel, P. (2010). Worshipping the Ideal King: On the Social Implications of Medieval Jaina Conversion Stories. In P. Schalk, M. Deeg, O. Freiberger, C. Kleine, & A. van Nahl (Eds.), Geschichten und Geschichte: Historiographie und Hagiographie in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte (357-432). Uppsala

• Publication Date: Oct 16, 2010
• Deposit Date: Oct 18, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 1, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 357-432
• Series Title: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Historia Religionum
• Book Title: Geschichten und Geschichte: Historiographie und Hagiographie in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte
• ISBN: 9789155477455
• Keywords: Jaina historiography, hagiography, rhetorics of conversion stories, communicative self-reference, exploitation of conversational implicature, social implicature, conversion as social drama, Śālibhadracarita, Ardhakathānaka,
• Publisher URL: http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=4&pid=diva2:306505