Jain Aagam are Jainism's supreme religious scriptures that deal with metaphysics, liberation of soul, and spiritual advice on how to lead a non-violent life. 💛
Of course, this is a very basic definition and does not fully capture the essence of the meticulous and exhaustive scriptures compiled over 2000 years ago by the ancient Indian monks.
Jain Aagam project is an Open Source project by CA Manas Madrecha to consolidate all the 45 Jain Aagam with their lakhs of aphormisms (sutra), along with meaning and explanation in multiple languages into a living document.
You can easily find Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Veda, etc. on internet. But, what if you want to read Jain Aagam?
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Try to Google it and all you find are some Wikipedia pages on lists of Jain literature or some Jain websites that provide the same list.
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Keep searching and you find that there are hardly 1--2 Jain websites that provide PDFs of Jain Aagam.
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Even if you find the PDFs, they are not translated, and who understands the ancient Prakrit language? 🤔
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So, you try to find some translated version of the Jain Aagam. And lo and behold, what you find is a website (Jain Aagam Mission) that only serves translated content in Gujarati language. (nonetheless, a great mission 🙏🏻)
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Great! Now, let's say you understand Gujarati, and you open the first book out of the dozens. It's of 500 pages. Let's suppose you begin this arduous journey. How do I search for some specific sutra or chapter or lesson?
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The website that serves Gujarati Jain Aagam doesn't have any Unicode encoding set for its PDFs. So, you can't even copy and paste some useful text you find. So, if you try to copy+paste, you will get weird looking characters.
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You have to download the entire huge book even if you want to read just a single chapter.
Firstly, my humble salutations to the Jain Aagam mission for making the Gujarati content of Jain Aagam available to everyone on their website via PDF.
But then, there are various issues with PDF in itself.
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You can't edit a PDF easily to rectify any typo or spelling mistakes or even genuine translation error.
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You have to maintain a separate word document, edit it, re-convert it into PDF and again upload it.
Currently, there are Jain websites that serve only PDFs of Jain Aagam, but there is no website that provides searchable and indexable contents of Jain Aagam, that too in multiple languages. We aim to be the first.
In short, we aim to transform the supreme but obscure Jain Aagam into living documents of the internet available to anyone and accessible anywhere.
You are more than welcome to contribute to this voluminous Jain Aagam venture by translating the meanings and explanations.
All the content of the website is saved in as you guessed, /content folder. 😁 It is categorized based on languages, i.e. en, hi, etc. The original Prakrit source is stored inside /content/original folder. You can easily edit any file and submit it to us for review.
I (CA Manas Madrecha) first conceptualised this project in 2019 and started with a simple WordPress website. It gained popularity but had to be taken down due to a malicious attack on some WordPress plugin. Fortunately, by 2021, I was a little conversant with JavaScript and web development and decided to move the project on self-created web app.
Currently, we are not backed by any Jain organisation, because this project was started as a hobby of mine to embark on a personal spiritual journey and document the process. I am a general Jainism enthusiast and I would love to connect with you if you too are interested in Jainism and its deep metaphysics.
- This project is created using Nuxt.js which is based on Vue.js.
- For styling purpose 🎨, we use Tailwind CSS.
- For storing the code 📁, we use GitHub (you are here BTW)
- For deployment 🚀, we use Firebase.
# install dependencies
$ npm install
# serve with hot reload at localhost:3000
$ npm run dev
# generate static project
$ npm run generateFor detailed explanation on how things work, check out Nuxt.js docs.