Sorry for the confusion... To be clear It is TOTALLY okay to jar up a text file and access it in hadoop via the class.getResource(...) api !
1) Hadoop doesn't do anything funny with the class loader, it just uses the Simple sun JVM class loader. 2) My problem was simply that I wasn't jarring up my text file properly. This was causing (obviously) all my mappers/reducers to not see my file. Thanks for all the responses they were helpful !
