Jain Seminar Series
Hilary Week 8, 11 March 2026, 2.30pm
Dr Ruth Westoby

Abstract

Jain yoga sources in the early centuries of the second millennium adopt practices of physical yoga and adapt them to distinctly Jain theories of the body and soul (jīva), metaphysics, and stages of spiritual perfection. Sources such as Śubhacandra’s Jñānārṇava and Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra teach physical practices, yet subordinate such physical practices to meditative techniques. There are many similarities with the Haṭha Yoga that emerges at a similar historical moment in sources from the Amṛtasiddhi to the Haṭhapradīpikā. This paper explores the presentation of the body in Jain sources in order to analyse both the rationale and efficacy of physical practices, and the role of materiality and gender in the physical—and liberated, body. Similarities and tensions are identified in the presentation of yogic bodies in the Haṭha corpus. I suggest that, for Jain sources, gender is a characteristic of the body in saṃsāra that is attenuated as the practitioner progresses. Though the perfected (siddha) body is in some ways beyond gender, it nevertheless also represents the paradigmatic male body.

Biography

Dr Ruth Westoby is a researcher in South Asian Religions and a yoga practitioner. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Jaina Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, focusing on technologies of the body in Jainism. As Affiliate Researcher at Inform, King’s College London and Associate Researcher at SOAS, University of London, Ruth researches bdoily practices and menstruation in yoga, tantra and neo-tantra. Her current book project is a study of the stopping of menstruation in South Asian religions. She teaches MA Yoga in the Modern World as Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS. Her PhD from SOAS (2024), supervised by Prof. James Mallinson, explored The Body in Early Haṭha Yogaand was funded by CHASE-AHRC. She also collaborated with the SOAS Haṭha Yoga Project (2015-2020) interpreting early modern yoga postures, contributing to an emergent research methodology, ‘embodied philology’.

Week 8, Thursday 12 March 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

Dr Janne Kontala

Yoga’s long journey from ancient South Asia to global studios and fitness centers has transformed its meanings in remarkable ways. Rooted in the religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism—especially the rich theistic currents within Hinduism—yoga today often appears as a secular, even commercial, pursuit. Many practitioners describe it as “spiritual but not religious,” yet traces of devotion and religious belief surface in both commercial presentations and polemical discussion.

This lecture explores how theistic worldviews live on within contemporary yoga. As part of a four-year research project Yoga in Finland (YOFI), funded by the Research Council of Finland and Polin Institute, I draw on over 500 responses from practitioners in Finland and India. I combine surveys, Q-methodology, and interviews to examine how beliefs, practices, and identities intertwine. The findings suggest that existing typologies of modern yoga overlook the fluid, lived realities of practitioners. Instead of fixed categories, I propose thinking of yoga through dimensions—practice, identity, belonging, and belief—revealing a far more complex and human picture of what it means to do yoga today.

Janne Kontala received his PhD at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, in 2016. He is currently employed as a researcher within the project Yoga in Finland (YOFI), funded by the Research Council of Finland and Polin Institute, where his research focuses on worldviews and values in contemporary yoga. As a teacher, Janne is currently also in charge of a yoga studies minor program in humanities.

In this talk, I reinvestigate the two-truths theory, i.e., niścaya- and vyavahāra nayas (absolute- and conventional-perspectives) and its purported incompatibility with anekāntavāda (non-one-sidedness). I argue against some of the previous scholarship on the subject and show that the two-truths theory in the Jaina context is sensitive to the spirit of non-one-sidedness. This is especially evident in the works of Amṛtacandra, but the sources of this could be traced back to Kundakunda as well. I also briefly reflect on how the two-truths theory in the Jain context differs from its Buddhist and Vedāntin parallels. Through this talk, I bring into discussion some of the underexplored dimensions of anekāntavāda, especially its role in domains such as ethics and soteriology that are beyond metaphysics.

Dr Jinesh R. Sheth is currently Dharmanath Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Jain Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is also a Project-Member of the Global Philosophy of Religion Project at UoB. He holds a BA (Sanskrit) degree from JRRSU, Jaipur, and MA (Philosophy) and PhD (Philosophy) degrees from University of Mumbai. His current research is focused on engaging with problems of philosophy through anekāntavāda (non-one-sidedness), especially dealing with issues pertaining to epistemology, ethics and soteriology.

Week 3, Thursday 5 February 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

Dr Malini Murali

Following the 19th Century’s feverish preoccupation with the East, very little sustained work has emerged over the next two centuries on translating pre-modern Indian texts and engaging with the reflective paradigms they endorse. The earlier efforts, mostly carried out by Orientalists, led to the establishment of Indology departments across Europe. In India, on the other hand, such rigorous institutional spaces are practically absent. The present interest in regional languages too tends to privilege a certain curated sense of “ancientness” as seen in the case of Bhakti poets. This has a direct bearing on translation practises that, when they do occur, seldom exhibit necessary critical shifts in the articulation of cultural difference. Hence, there is a pressing need to imagine translation as a mode through which the past may be rendered through renewed linguistic, aesthetic and epistemic registers; in other words, to conceive of translation as a way of configuring contemporaneity. I will illustrate this proposition through my engagements with two pre-modern compositions from Kerala—Adhyatmaramayanam Kilipattu and Nalacharitam Attakatha.

Malini Murali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Devaswom Board College, Thalayolaparambu, affiliated with Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. She is the 2026 Charles Wallace Fellow at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, where she will undertake an English translation of Unnayi Warrier’s Nalacharitam Attakatha, the most celebrated composition in the Kathakali repertoire. Her doctoral work, Offering to Ezhutachan: An Annotated Translation of Adhyatmaramayanam Kilipattu, was awarded an Excellent Grade by the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and is scheduled for publication by Rupa in 2026. Her talks on language, literature, and culture are periodically broadcast on All India Radio. Her research interests include critical humanities, literary and cultural studies, and South Asian studies. She is actively engaged in the study and translation of both pre-modern and contemporary Malayalam compositions.

Lecture of the J.P. and Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow
Week 4, Wednesday 11 February 2.30-3.30, OCHS Library

Dr Alan Herbert

I am interested in whether typical philosophical methods can adequately grasp diverse, and even contradictory, conceptions of divinity. As an illustrative example, I will look to the concept of Kṛṣṇa in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theology. This tradition seeks to accommodate and balance a Vedāntic perspective in which Kṛṣṇa is positioned as the fullest expression of God, or Bhagavān, surpassing Brahman (by way of its interpretations of the Upaniṣads, Purāṇas, and Tantras), with its own intensely emotive bhakti (devotion), which regards Kṛṣṇa as incomplete without his intrinsic potency, or Śakti—specifically Rādhā, his closest confidante. This Gauḍīya approach raises questions about the problems that philosophy has in explaining hierarchical features of the divine alongside the deeply personal reality of God, the understanding of which, especially in this case of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa, is often gained through a recommended participatory engagement in a religious process.

Alan Herbert’s specialities and interests lie in philosophy, religion, Indian thought and culture. He is also acquainted with sociology. He draws on a wide range of teaching experience in both tertiary and secondary/high school education in the USA, UK, and Asia, all of which informs his research. Currently, he is a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. There he directs research projects, develops and runs online courses, teaches, tutors, mentors, publishes, and organises conferences. Recently he has been working on projects and papers exploring issues in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, personal identity, imagination studies, Indian theology, and societal problems among contemporary Hinduism and Hindus.