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ei o4 COLOR-Yllen Hilal ? interpretation of the Jain model of geography, one thing is clear that Jain saints and scholars must unequivocally adopt the modern geography and astronomy without any reservations. This is urgently required because these controversies have brought a bad name to the Jain philosophy and, although as a philosophy Jainism is very profound, contains deep insights about interdependence of life, brilliant expositions about laws of nature and human behaviour, geographical and astronomical descriptions have created some trust deficiency.
There are many uncertainties, not only in interpretation, but in the prevalent terminology, values of various units of time and length, confusion between linear, area and volume measurements etc. given in the Jain texts. Differences between Digambar and swetambar traditions create additional complications.
The new approach of reinterpreting the geographical texts has been proposed by Dr. Jeoraj Jain, a renowned scholar of Jainism, that pictures and diagrams given in Jain texts are not geographical maps but actually are pictograms or ornamental representation of features, the codes used in their presentation having been forgotten or lost over the millennia of oral transfer of knowledge. This looks rational and acceptable. It is possible that the geographical data are presented, not as aerial or geometrical features but pooled in a special way to convey some broad, statistical or average characteristics of the earth, galaxy or the universe. Then the problem reduces to correctly decoding the methodology used in
