History, Scripture and Controversy in a Medieval Jain Sect

Paul Dundas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415376112
• eBook ISBN: 9781135531355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Examining the history and intellectual activity of the medieval Svetambara Jain renunciant order, the Tapa Gaccha, this book focuses on the consolidation by the Tapa Gaccha from the thirteenth century of its identity as the leading Svetambara order. The author argues that this was variously effected by negotiating the primacy of lineage, the posthumous divinity of one of its leaders, the validity of styles of scriptural exegesis and customary practice and the status of non-Jains through the medium of chronicles and poetry and polemical engagement with other Jain orders and dissident elements within its own ranks.

Drawing on largely unstudied primary sources, the author demonstrates how Tapa Gaccha writers created a sophisticated intellectual culture which was a vehicle for the maintenance of sectarian identity in the early modern period. The book explores issues which have been central to our understanding of many of the questions currently being asked about the development not just of Jainism but of South Asian religions in general, such as the manner in which authority is established in relation to texts, the relationship between scripture, commentary and tradition and tensions both between and within sects.

1
The Uplifting of Morality

Lineage history and the beginnings of the Tapā Gaccha

The range of divergent practices found within the Śvetāmbara Jain community in the early centuries of the second millennium CE would not have impinged greatly on the attention of an outsider. However, for renunciant intellectuals intent on asserting both the primacy of their own particular disciplinary order and the fundamental unity of Jainism’s teachings such diversity required urgent confrontation and explanation, and so from around the end of the thirteenth century there emerged examples of a Tapā Gaccha literature of polemic directed against the actualities of Śvetāmbara sectarian pluralism. Not necessarily the first but arguably the most readily identifiable of the early polemicists was Kulamaṇḍanasūri (1353–1399), a pupil of Devasundarasūri (1352–1398), the forty-ninth leader of the order, whose attempt to articulate a Tapā Gaccha orthodoxy through the exposure of the deviance of alternative modes of practice was embodied in his Vicāṛāmrtasārasaṃgraha (VSS), ‘The Collection of the Ambrosial Essence of Reflections on Difficulties’, of 1386.¹

Customary practice and the Śvetāmbara gaccha

The VSS is organised in a series of sections which, after an initial general consideration of the nature of pravacana, the Jain teachings,² successively address twenty-four controversial topics relating to the calendar, ritual and liturgy of the Śvetāmbara Jains. No developed reference is made by Kulamaṇḍanasūri to any Śvetāmbara sectarian leaders who might have been involved in the formulation or promulgation of what he regards as deviant teachings, nor does he significantly emphasise his own affiliation to the Tapā Gaccha. It is only towards the end of the VSS, with the twenty-first topic to be addressed (VSS pp.83–7),³ that Kulamaṇḍanasūri considers the central question of the variety of forms of sāmācārī, customary behaviour, which were to be found among the Śvetāmbaras in his time, often at variance with each other owing to the fission of the community into different gacchas. To what extent, Kulamaṇḍanasūri asks, can all of these codes of practice be regarded as possessing any innate authority? For those monks, versed in the Jain teachings ( prāvacanika), who have elaborated differing modes of gaccha practice, must have themselves inevitably experienced unique karmic destinies which would preclude the possibility of any unity of purpose among them.⁴ Furthermore, the scriptural texts legislating for monastic behaviour repeatedly describe not only general but specific rules which relate to particular cases and so could well be regarded as sanctioning diversity of conduct.

To clarify this situation, Kulamaṇḍanasūri identifies the necessary defining feature of a valid sāmācārī as being practice (ācaraṇā) correctly followed by individuals of appropriate moral probity. In support of this judgement he quotes a verse by Saṅnghadāsa (c.sixth century CE), which was to serve many medieval Śvetámbara polemicists as a touchstone for the definition of correct ethical behaviour:⁵

Whatever unobjectionable thing is performed by a morally trustworthy (asaḍha) man when there is any (appropriate) cause and is not prevented by others but greatly approved, this is correct behaviour.

(Saṅghadāsa, Bṛhatkalpa Bhāṣya v.4499)

Correct moral conduct is here envisaged as not simply action performed by an individual who is free from the influence of the negative passions of attachment and hatred but also the general acceptance of this action by others. Kulamaṇḍanasūri gives as an example of such behavioural consensus the acceptance of the innovation effected by Kālaka, the early common era teacher, who for practical purposes in 466 CE shifted the date of Saṃvatsarī, the culminating day of Paryuṣaṇ, most important festival in the Śvetāmbara calendar, from the fifth day of the month of Bhādrapada (August–September), when it had supposedly been celebrated from the time of Mahāvīra’s disciples, to the fourth day and whose authority to effect this was, according to the sources, unchallenged by the Jain community at the time on the grounds that the instigator of the change was an āgamavyavahārin, a master of the totality of the available scriptural tradition.⁶

This allusion to Kālaka by Kulamaṇḍanasūri is pointed since it draws attention to the main issue involved in the Tapā Gaccha’s rejection of alternative codifications of Jain practice, namely the fact that conventionally sanctioned behaviour could on occasion appear to be at variance with the pronouncements of the authoritative textual tradition. An obvious example of this, presented as the first controversial issue in the VSS and which was greatly to exercise later Tapā polemicists, was the redating of the fortnightly ( pākṣika) observance of ritualised repentance (pratikramaṇa) from the fourteenth day of the month to the full moon day (pūrṇimā) by the Paurṇamīyaka Gaccha, an order founded by Candraprabhasūri at the beginning of the twelfth century.⁷ Scriptural sources were adduced by the Paurṇamīyakas to support such a calendrical change, but they were contrary to what had become customary practice as followed by the Tapā Gaccha and other Śvetāmbara disciplinary orders.⁸ Such flouting of established custom, Kulamaṇḍanasūri asserts, could only betoken serious disregard for the general concerns of the Śvetāmbara community and the practice of the great teachers who have themselves continuously represented its main point of authoritative reference.

Kulamaṇḍanasūri further points out that the codes of customary practice of several contemporary Śvetāmbara orders manifestly differed, as in the case of the six Obligatory Actions (Āvaśyaka) where variations in respect to styles of performance of these essential disciplinary exercises regularly occurred across sectarian boundaries.⁹ However, he argues that there can exist no genuinely radical variation within customary practice if it is promulgated by experienced (gītārtha) and morally sincere monks and imbued with the accepted characteristics of correct behaviour. Such behaviour is inextricably linked to the properly constituted channel of transmission and teacher succession (ācāryaparamparā) which is historically the only valid source of authority within Jainism on the grounds of its capacity to explicate the meaning of scripture. If a teacher’s position is stated to be based on the traditional teachings, then he must necessarily accept the legitimate teacher succession on the grounds that the meaning of those teachings cannot be understood without its interpretative mediation. As Kulamaṇḍanasūri mordantly puts it, any judgement deficient in these terms can only be compared to a picture painted by a drunkard.

But teacher succession in itself is not sufficient to guarantee the authority of correct practice, for otherwise the behaviour of illegitimately constituted gacchas which do not fulfil the disciplinary requirements of the Jain path would be accepted as valid on the grounds that they also possess their own chains of pupillary descent. A genuine lineage of teachers is required to exemplify the identifiable characteristics of correct behaviour, manifestly absent in the practice of undisciplined monks whose most serious defect lies in their receiving alms in a manner which infringes rules relating to the observance of non-violence towards all forms of living creatures. Lax behaviour of this sort cannot be conjoined with authority and it is impossible for those monks who engage in it to be morally trustworthy. As an example of an erroneous sāmācārī, Kulamaṇḍanasūri refers to the Śatapadī, originally written in 1206 by Dharmaghoṣasūri and subsequently adapted and abbreviated by Mahendrasiṃhasūri and Merutuṅgasūri, which records the customary practice of the Añcala Gaccha, a Śvetāmbara order which emerged in 1112 claiming to promote ritual reforms in conformity with original scriptural prescription, such as the celebration of Paryusan on the fifth day of the month and the performance of the fortnightly pratikramaṇa ceremony on the full moon day^.10 Kulamaṇḍanasūri stigmatises theŚatapadī as a repository of novelties infringing the traditional practice of the genuine Jain teacher lineage. Such, for the Tapā Gaccha, false codes of behaviour can, however, be easily demonstrated to have no warranty by an appeal to the authority of the treatises composed by both ancient and more recent monks who have understood the true purport of the teachings and also by reference to an actual historical event, the expulsion from Gujarat in the twelfth century of the Pauṇramīyaka Gaccha, from which the Añcala Gaccha had originally emerged, by the common assent of theŚvetāmbara community led by Hemacandra for its perverse insistence on promoting the full moon doctrine^.11 In doing so, Kulamṇḍanasūri asserts, the orthodox community at that time did not in any manner transgress traditional teaching.

Kulamaṇḍanasūri sums up his position on customary behaviour thus:¹²

Although members of other gacchas do not follow the code of practice enacted by the morally sincere, they can nonetheless respect it as authoritative. However, nobody who knows the inner meaning (rahasya) of the traditional teachings can conceivably have trust in the mode of behaviour promulgated by those who uproot the code of practice which has come down through the legitimate teacher succession. For behaviour endowed with the characteristics of morality is the only authority.¹³

(VSS p.87)

Little reading between the lines is required here. If authority stems from correct practice which is in turn enshrined within the institution of legitimately constituted teacher succession, then only those monks who represent the true Jain lineage can enact the requirements of that behaviour which bestows authority. Kulamaṇḍanasūri makes this clear in the conclusion to the VSS when he refers to his preceptorial connections that such monks cannot be other than the teachers and senior monks of the Tapā Gaccha.

In Chapters 4 and 5 I will deal more fully with Tapā Gaccha attitudes to rival Śvetāmbara groups and the moral standing of non-Jains. In what follows now I intend to investigate the role of lineage as bearer and transmitter of that mode of practice which enabled the Tapā Gaccha to claim an ascendancy within the medieval Śvetāmbara Jain sectarian milieu.

Lineage and genealogy in Śvetāmbara Jainism

The correct recording of lineage is imperative for any tradition, esoteric or exoteric, whose identity is bound up with some sort of organisational structure handed down across generations of recruits and officeholders and it is accordingly a ubiquitous theme in North Indian hagiography where issues relating to the validation of the mechanisms involved in such transmissions regularly have an important place.¹⁴ Whether a line of pupillary descent is fancifully concocted or a genuine representation of a handing down of authority is of course ultimately immaterial, for a lineage record, like history itself, is not simply a blank tablet on which the past is recorded but invariably derives its actual significance from the differing uses to which it can be put by those who have framed and disseminated it and those who subsequently subscribe to its version of what has gone before.

These uses necessarily vary depending on context. Thus, most obviously, lineage records provide the materials in the form of genealogy and narrative which furnish the common memory and imaginative resources essential to the maintenance of identity for participants, new and old, in any shared social institution.¹⁵ As far as the Śvetāmbara Jain disciplinary orders were concerned, because their teacher–pupil lineages looked backwards in time while also embodying a means to project themselves into the future through successive attainments of senior monastic rank, identification with the details of a preceptorial line necessarily entailed a willingness to re-enact its past through a conscious process of emulation. A lineage record might variously represent a commemoration of illustrious dead teachers or a proof of the validity of the tradition, providing evidence of past spiritual and ritual attainment and performance of miracul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on dating and nomenclature
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: the background to the Tapā Gaccha
• 1 The uplifting of morality: lineage history and the beginnings of the Tapā Gaccha
• 2 From monk to god: the transformation of Hīravijayasūri
• 3 Unlocking the casket: Tapā Gaccha attitudes to scripture and exegesis
• 4 Digging up the roots of deviance: Tapā Gaccha perspectives on heresy
• 5 Drops of water in the ocean of Jainism: the dispute within the Tapā Gaccha concerning inclusivism
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index