Padmanabh Jaini
Indian-born American scholar of Jainism and Buddhism (1923–2021)
Padmanabh Shrivarma Jaini (October 23, 1923 – May 25, 2021) was an Indian-American scholar of Jainism and Buddhism, living in Berkeley, California, United States. He was from a Digambar Jain family; however he was equally familiar with both the Digambara and Śvetāmbara forms of Jainism. He has taught at the Banaras Hindu University, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he retired in 1994. Jaini was the author of several books and papers. His best known work is The Jaina Path of Purification (1979). Some of his major articles have been published under these titles: The Collected Papers on Jaina Studies (2000) and Collected Papers on Buddhist Studies (2001). He died on 25 May 2021 at Berkeley at age 97.
Early life and education
Jaini was born to a Digambar Jain family residing in Nellikar, a small town near Moodabidri, Karnataka, India on October 23, 1923. His father had abandoned his title of Shetty and adopted the name of Jaini—after the famous Jain scholar, Jugmandar Lal Jaini (1881–1927)—responding to calls within the community to change their names to foster a greater sense of Jain identity. After completing his elementary education, he was sent to Digambara Jain Gurukul, a boarding school in Karanja in Vidharbha, Maharashtra.
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This entry incorporates text from “Padmanabh Jaini” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.