*runs to get his notes*

Well if you want to be a Jain, you'd pretty much have to move to India. It's a relatively small religion--the smallest of the major world religions, numbering a few million in various parts of India. This is mainly because it was considered, for a very long time, indulgent and irresponsible to travel great distances on anything but your own two feet.

It very much an atheistic religion, believing in the existence and even the power of gods, demons, and amazing beings of all sorts, but totally discounting their spiritual value. Many Jains will worship at Hindu temples because they believe in the power of those gods to help them in worldly matters, and even though it has a very anti-materialist basis, Jainists see no moral dilemma with this, as enlightenment won't even be possible in this epoch. Again, they aren't trying to achieve enlightenment now, later in this life or even in the next, they are trying to push themselves to be in a better spot and position to gain salvation in some distant lifetime. The Tirthankaras are not gods, and this is important to note, they are more like role models or saints, they have made salvation possible for the rest of us, and they were legendarily great men, but they can't help you. The Jains avidly believe that the only person who can help your spiritual situation is you.

Jain philosophy is often described as terribly pessimistic, I don't think so, but whatev. One story goes something like, "A man was walking down a path through a forest when he found he was being followed by a tiger. Terrified, he ran faster down the path. Fatser and faster he ran until he came to a rock, which he trips over into a pit of vipers. The man was luckily able to grab onto a tree root before he fell all the way into the pit. As he is hanging there, tiger above, vipers below, ants gnawing on the root, he looks around desparately and notices a delectable fruit, fallen from a tree, desparate for one last pleasure before his doom, he reaches perilously for the piece of fruit." This was once used by Jain to describe the eternal misery of the cycle of birth and death, Samsara.

The only division in the small community is not a very important one: It has to do with the attire of monks. As all Jainists spend time as monks, and many will spend their whole lives monastically, the division about what monks wear might be kind of important, but really isn't. And while I can't think of the Sanskrit words for them, they are the "white-clad" and the "sky-clad." The white-clad wear plain white robes during their monkhood, the sky-clad go naked, imagine spending three to five years naked, eating next to nothing, meditating all the time. These guys are hardcore.