Ānanda, the paradigmatic Jain layman who is the subject of the first section of the Śvetāmbara canonical text the Upāsakadaśāḥ, is characterised by his extreme wealth or rather by his possession of money in the form of gold pieces: 120 million of them to be exact. Ānanda’s possession of such a large amount of money makes his eventual renunciation all the more impressive. In Jainism there is a symbiosis between wealth and renunciation. This paper seeks to explore this symbiosis in the light of theoretical approaches to the sociology of money. The forms of money are protean; they range from Ānanda’s tangible money in the shape of coins with a positive intrinsic value to today’s largely invisible money, which depends on a negative concept, debt, for its value. The paper will attempt to survey the interface between Jain ethical values and money in its various forms.

Programme

First Session: Monks and Merchants
 

9:00am	Tea and Coffee
9:15am	Johannes Bronkhorst (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) - Two Uses of Anekāntavāda
9:45am	Christine Chojnacki (University of Lyon, France) - A Successful Investment: Jain Merchants and the Transmission of Long Medieval Narratives
10:15am	Aleksandra Restifo (University of Oxford) - Disentangling Poetry from Profit in Jain Monks’ Literary Works
10:45am	Tea and Coffee

Second Session: Jaina-Philanthropy

11:15am	Basile Leclère (University of Lyon, France) - The Gold of Gods: Stories of Temple Financing from Jain Prabandhas
11:45am	Bindi Shah (University of Southampton) - Enacting Contemporary Jain Religiosity through Philanthropy in the Diaspora
12:15pm	Christopher Chapple (Loyola University, Los Angeles) - Jain Philanthropic Support of Higher Education in North America
12:45pm	Group Photo
1:00pm	Lunch

Third Session: Money and Karma

2:00pm	Whitney Kelting (Eastern University, Boston) - Money, Piety, and Masculinity in Jain Maharashtra
2:30pm	William G. Clarence-Smith (SOAS) - Jainism and the Pearling Economy, 19th and 20th Centuries
3:00pm	Peter Flügel (SOAS) - Selling and Buying: Karmic Fruits of Transactions
3:30pm	Tea and Coffee

Fourth Session: Money, Wealth, Ethics

4:00pm

Roundtable Discussion - Sam Whimster (chair), Abay Firodia, Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Michael Mainelli, Andrew McMurtrie and others

Fifth Session: Jaina Economics

5:00pm	Atul Shah (City University, London) - Aparigraha: Understanding the Nature and Limits of Money
5:30pm	Roundtable Discussion - Marcus Banks (chair), Miten Shah, Ellis Dee, Georgeou, Sagar K. Shah and others
6:30pm	Final Remarks