SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In the last two and a half millennia the itinerant Jaina mendicant tradition exerted an important influence on Indian culture and society. From its region of origin in modern Bihar it spread across most parts of South Asia and beyond. In the process it segmented into numerous schools, sects, and lineages, which emerged and differentiated in complex interaction with local social and political configurations. The Jaina-Prosopography Database is an open access tool for the reconstruction of the social and literary history of the Jaina tradition, by cross-referencing, statistical mapping and visualising the complex data embedded in the vast corpus of Jaina manuscripts, inscriptions and published works. At the heart of the database is a comprehensive, inductively generated taxonomy reflecting the variation of historical data in the primary sources.