Jains have always lived as a minority – at best, a plurality – in a rich and astoundingly varied cultural milieu in India. These three chapters concern the Jains' profound engagement with that wider world, the ways in which they have continued to mark themselves off, and the accommodations they have made.

In his chapter the Indologist Padmanabh Jaini asks whether there is a ‘popular Jainism’? The sense of this question derives from a comparison with Theravada Buddhism, which in Jaini's view had gone very far towards incorporating relatively unreflective but fundamental and widespread practices and attitudes from the Indie world. Jaini shows that Jain writers in the medieval period vigorously opposed such common practices as offerings to the dead, worship of trees and mounds of earth, ritual bathing, observances connected with celestial events and the worship of deities. Jains did incorporate Indie deities into their temples, but gave them a subsidiary place, whereas Buddhists in Sri Lanka elevated similar deities to substantial positions in official Buddhist doctrine and practice.

The strong terms in which Jain writers opposed such practices gives the term ‘popular’ a clear meaning: those beliefs and practices which did not accord with the learned Jain interpretation of what belonged to Jainism (jainadharma) itself. Sri Lankan Buddhists did, on this showing, seem considerably less concerned to police their boundaries.