Fasting

BBC Religions provides an overview of the religious practice of fasting among Jains, including the concept of fasting to death, called santhara or sallenkhana

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/jainism/customs/fasting_1.shtml

Figure of a vidyā-devī

An 11th-century carving of one of the 16 vidyā-devīs – goddesses of magical knowledge – held at the British Museum in London.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1880-349

Figure of Ambikā or Kūṣmāṇḍinī

Sculpture on Flickr of the goddess Ambikā or Kūṣmāṇḍinī in the Rani Durgavati Museum, Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh. She is the yakṣī – female attendant deity – of the 22nd Jina Nemi, and is a protective goddess connected with children and fertility. The jewellery-bedecked statue was probably originally holding a small child on her left knee, though this part has been badly damaged.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lobodrl/7005784603/

Five Great Monastic Vows

Pravin K. Shah writes about the Five Great Vows taken by Jain monks and nuns. The information is provided by the Jainism Literature Center, associated with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~pluralsm/affiliates/jainism/jainedu/5greatvows.htm

Fourteen guṇa-sthāna

Slideshare provides Arun Zaveri's presentation on the 14 guṇa-sthānas, first delivered in Massachusetts, USA in September 2013 as part of a lecture series during the festival of Paryuṣaṇ and Daśa-lakṣaṇa-parvan.

http://www.slideshare.net/ScientificMeditation/6-fourteen-gunasthana

Francis Buchanan biography

This Wikipedia entry profiles Francis Buchanan (1762–1829), who carried out extensive surveys of southern and north-eastern India during the British East India company's expansion into India.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Buchanan

Francis Whyte Ellis biography

A civil servant in the East India Company during the early colonisation of India by the British, Francis Whyte Ellis (1777–1819) became a well-known scholar in the Tamil and Sanskrit languages. This entry from volume 17 of the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) appears in Wikisource.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ellis,_Francis_Whyte_%28DNB00%29

Free Will and Karma

N. L. Kachhara describes the interplay of karma and the mind, focusing on the issue of free will and karma in Jain thought. This 2011 article is provided on the HereNow4U website.

http://www.herenow4u.net/index.php?id=76586