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Jains align with Tibetan cause

Buddhists and Jains have a lot in common, according to the Dalai Lama.

The president of the International Mahavir Jain Mission, Shanti Shah, said the Buddhist spiritual leader had stressed on the similarities between the two faiths when the two met recently.

Shah, who returned to Toronto recently after a private meeting with the Dalai Lama in Portland, Oregon, says he told the Dalai Lama that the Jains had been remiss in not aligning with the Tibetan cause a lot earlier.

While divisions among the Jains themselves prevented such an alignment in India, Shah, who also heads the IMJM Siddhachalam Centre at Blairstown in New Jersey said it was possible for Jains to align with the Tibetan cause outside India.

In his personal message of April 27, the Dalai Lama told Shah, "I feel that we have much to offer the world -- the concept of compassion, of harmony with the environment, and non-violence."

According to him, World Tibet Day, to be celebrated worldwide on July 7, "has helped greatly in deepening public appreciation for the richness of Tibetan culture and thought" and that "it has clearly raised public awareness about the present threat to the very existence of the Tibetan people".

Shah joined the Tibetan group that recently demonstrated outside the United Nations headquarters in New York in support of the Tibetan cause.

He has written a Jain prayer for World Tibet Day that coincides with the birthday of the Dalai Lama, and the inter-faith call, which will be celebrated on October 25. It is for the first time that the Jain prayer will be offered in support of the Tibetan cause, Shah said.

"It is an interfaith event in that all sorts of different faiths pray in their own temples, churches, mosques, etc and in their own way for Tibet. Many faiths join in while separate and distinct from a collective inter-faith voice in this case," Richard Rosenkranz, executive director of Interfaith Call for Universal Freedom of Worship and for Human Rights in Tibet said in a recent press release.

Shah is offering the special prayer service to Jain communities worldwide in support of Tibet.

He said the joint statement by people of faith would affirm "that all people of every faith and tradition have the right to worship God freely" and the call "also focuses on the tragic situation facing the people of Tibet who do not have freedom of religion and who face terrible human rights abuses daily".

Jain prayers start with the preamble of Anekant and Ahimsa that extend beyond religion and spirituality and is found wherever the quest is to find truth and the absolute truth.

"I do not know that I do not know. I do not know and therefore I seek. I seek the truth..." is part of the Jain prayer and it goes on to argue that the concept of Anekant is not unique to the Jains.

Similar prayers in defence of religious freedom and freedom of worship in Tibet have been written by other faith leaders for World Tibet Day and the Inter-faith Call. These include Reverend James Parks Morton, dean emeritus of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York; Rabbi Herman Schaalman, rabbi emeritus of the Emmanuel Congregation in Chicago; Rev Marcus Braybrooke, co-president of the World Congress of Faiths at Oxford; Dr Deepak Chopra, founder of the Chopra Centre for Well-Being; Deborah Moldow, of the UN World Peace Prayer Society; Chief Seattle from the Suquamish Tribe; Dr Irfan Ahmad Khan; Fr Thomas Keating, member of the International Committee for the Peace Council; and Desmond M Tutu, archbishop emeritus of Cape Town.

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