Jainism in the context of "Kama"

Human history or world history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers. They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread to every continent except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. Soon afterward, the Neolithic Revolution in West Asia brought the first systematic husbandry of plants and animals, and saw many humans transition from nomadic lives to sedentary existences as farmers in permanent settlements. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting and writing.

These developments paved the way for the emergence of early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru, the Indus Valley, and China, marking the beginning of the ancient period in the 4th millenium BCE. These civilizations enabled the establishment of regional empires and provided fertile ground for the advent of transformative philosophical and religious ideas. Hinduism originated during the late Bronze Age and was followed by the many seminal belief systems of the Axial Age: Buddhism, Confucianism, Greek philosophy, Jainism, Judaism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism. Christianity began later as an offshoot of Judaism. The subsequent post-classical period, from about 500 to 1500 CE, witnessed the rise of Islam and China's flourishing under the Tang and Song dynasties while civilization expanded to new parts of the world and trade between societies increased. The political landscape was shaped by the rise and fall of major empires, such as the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic caliphates, and the Mongol Empire. This period's invention of gunpowder and the printing press greatly affected later history.

Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, beliefs, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or poetry. The information is mentally recorded by oral repositories, sometimes termed "walking libraries", who are usually also performers. Oral tradition is a medium of communication for a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law and other knowledge across generations without a writing system, or in parallel to a writing system. It is the most widespread medium of human communication. They often remain in use in the modern era throughout for cultural preservation.

Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, and Jainism have used oral tradition, in parallel to writing, to transmit their canonical scriptures, rituals, hymns and mythologies. African societies have broadly been labelled oral civilisations, contrasted with literate civilisations, due to their reverence for the oral word and widespread use of oral tradition.

Anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago. The earliest known human remains in South Asia date to 30,000 years ago. Sedentariness began in South Asia around 7000 BCE; by 4500 BCE, settled life had spread, and gradually evolved into the Indus Valley Civilisation, one of three early cradles of civilisation in the Old World, which flourished between 2500 BCE and 1900 BCE in present-day Pakistan and north-western India. Early in the second millennium BCE, persistent drought caused the population of the Indus Valley to scatter from large urban centres to villages. Indo-Aryan tribes moved into the Punjab from Central Asia in several waves of migration. The Vedic Period of the Vedic people in northern India (1500–500 BCE) was marked by the composition of their extensive collections of hymns (Vedas). The social structure was loosely stratified via the varna system, incorporated into the highly evolved present-day Jāti system. The pastoral and nomadic Indo-Aryans spread from the Punjab into the Gangetic plain. Around 600 BCE a second urbanization occured resulting in a new interregional culture; then, smaller janapadas (realms) were consolidated into mahajanapadas (great states). This period saw the rise of new ascetic movements and religious concepts, including the rise of Jainism and Buddhism. The latter was synthesized with the preexisting religious cultures of the subcontinent, giving rise to Hinduism.

Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nanda Empire and established the first great empire in ancient India, the Maurya Empire. India's Mauryan king Ashoka is widely recognised for the violent Kalinga War and his historical acceptance of Buddhism and his attempts to spread nonviolence and peace across his empire. This period marks the rapid dissemination of Śramaṇic religions.

South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia that is defined in both geographical and ethnic-cultural terms. South Asia, with a population of 2.04 billion, contains a quarter (25%) of the world's population. As commonly conceptualised, the modern states of South Asia include Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, with Afghanistan also often included, which may otherwise be classified as part of Central Asia. South Asia borders East Asia to the northeast, Central Asia to the northwest, West Asia to the west and Southeast Asia to the east. Apart from Southeast Asia, Maritime South Asia is the only subregion of Asia that lies partly within the Southern Hemisphere. The British Indian Ocean Territory and two out of 26 atolls of the Maldives in South Asia lie entirely within the Southern Hemisphere. Topographically, it is dominated by the Indian subcontinent and is bounded by the Indian Ocean in the south, and the Himalayas, Karakoram, and Pamir Mountains in the north.

Settled life emerged on the Indian subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus River Basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest, with the Dravidian languages being supplanted in the northern and western regions. By 400 BCE, stratification and exclusion by caste had emerged within Hinduism, and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity.

Veneration (Latin: veneratio; Greek: τιμάω timáō), refers to the practice of honoring people and articles of religious significance. The term applies, for example, to the veneration of saints and the veneration of relics.

To venerate a saint is honour a person who has been identified as having a high degree of sanctity or holiness. Angels are shown similar veneration in many religions. Veneration of saints is practiced, formally or informally, by adherents of some branches of all major religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Jainism.

A temple (from the Latin templum) is a place of worship, a building used for spiritual rituals and activities such as prayer and sacrifice. By convention, the specially built places of worship for some religions are commonly called "temples" in English, while those of other religions are not, even though they fulfill very similar functions.

The religions for which the terms are used include the great majority of ancient religions that are now extinct, such as the Ancient Egyptian religion and the Ancient Greek religion. Among religions still active: Hinduism (whose temples are called mandir or kovil), Buddhism (whose temples are called vihara), Sikhism (whose temples are called gurudwara), Jainism (whose temples are sometimes called derasar), Zoroastrianism (whose temples are sometimes called agiary), the Baháʼí Faith (which are often simply referred to as Baháʼí House of Worship), Taoism (which are sometimes called daoguan), Shinto (which are often called jinja), Confucianism (which are sometimes called the Temple of Confucius).

Jain philosophy or Jaina philosophy refers to the ancient Indian philosophical system of the Jain religion. It comprises all the philosophical investigations and systems of inquiry that developed among the early branches of Jainism in ancient India following the nirvana of Mahāvīra (c. 6th or 5th century BCE). One of the main features of Jain philosophy is its dualistic metaphysics, which holds that there are two distinct categories of existence: the living, conscious, or sentient entities (jīva) and the non-living or material entities (ajīva).

Jain texts discuss numerous philosophical topics such as cosmology, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, the philosophy of time, and soteriology. Jain thought is primarily concerned with understanding the nature of living beings, how these beings are bound by the processes of karma (which are seen as fine material particles) and how living beings may be liberated (moksha) from the cycle of death and rebirth (saṃsāra). A peculiarity of Jainism is to essentially associate several renunciatory liberating practices with the imperative of non-violence (ahiṃsā). Jainism and its philosophical system are also notable for the belief in a beginning-less and cyclical universe, which posits a non-theistic understanding of the world and the complete rejection of a hypothetical creator deity. Jain philosophy is also noted for its "realist epistemology" of anekāntavāda ("many-sidedness"), a rejection of all simplistic and one-sided views of truth and reality.

A hagiography (/ˌhæɡiˈɒɡrəfi/; from Ancient Greek ἅγιος (hágios) 'holy' and -γραφία (-graphía) 'writing') is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. Early Christian hagiographies might consist of a biography or vita (Latin for 'life', which begins the title of most medieval biographies), a description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of the saint's martyrdom (called a passio), or be a combination of these.

Christian hagiographies focus on the lives, and notably the miracles, ascribed to men and women canonized by the Roman Catholic church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox churches, and the Church of the East. Other religious traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Islam, Sikhism and Jainism also create and maintain hagiographical texts (such as the Sikh Janamsakhis) concerning saints, gurus and other individuals believed to be imbued with sacred power.