The Jains

Paul Dundas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134501656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Indian religion of Jainism, whose central tenet involves non-violence to all creatures, is one of the world's oldest and least-understood faiths. Dundas looks at Jainism in its social and doctrinal context, explaining its history, sects, scriptures and ritual, and describing how the Jains have, over 2500 years, defined themselves as a unique religious community. This revised and expanded edition takes account of new research into Jainism.

1 The fordmakers

According to tradition, the great medieval Śvetāmbara Jain scholar-monk Haribhadra was in his early years a learned brahman who boasted that he would become the pupil of anyone whose teachings he could not controvert. One day he heard a Jain nun called Yākinī reciting a verse which to his astonishment he could not understand. On being questioned she directed Haribhadra to her teacher who instructed him in the basics of Jain doctrine and converted him.¹

Haribhadra’s bemusement is understandable. The verse Yākinī is supposed to have recited relates to a specifically Jain version of the legendary history of the world known as the ‘Deeds of the Sixty-three Illustrious Men’, or, as it is called by western scholars, the Universal History, which provides a description on a massive scale of the destinies, enacted over a vast period of time, of the twenty-four Jain teachers, the fordmakers, and their contemporaries.² Haribhadra would on studying the Universal History have found amongst other surprises that the supposedly eternal and authorless Hindu scripture, the Veda, had in fact been created by Bharata, the first Jain universal emperor of this world era, and that two of the central focuses of Hindu religious devotion, Rāma and Krṣṇa, were in actuality Jain laymen.

Jainism is believed by its followers to be everlasting, without beginning or end, the Universal History describing just one tiny portion of an eternal process. For those approaching Jainism from outside its tradition, there is of course another type of Jain history, reconstructed by scholars from the mass of literature, monastic chronicles and inscriptions, often full of gaps and vague in chronology. While a historian of the Jains will inevitably draw on such material, it must also be borne in mind that Jainism structures its own sense of history within a different temporal context. An early source records a prophecy that the tīrtha, the community which puts the Jain doctrine into practice, will outlast Mahāvīra, the last of the omniscient fordmakers, by 21,000 years, during which time the religion will go into a decline, to be reawakened only during the course of the next world era (Bh 20.8).³ The Jains share with the Hindus the notion of the Kali Yuga, the Corrupt Age, which for them involves a gradual diminishment of culture, religion and eventually even human stature. This age, in which we are living now, has been continually invoked by Jain writers from the early medieval period and provides an over-arching principle with reference to which the tradition can explain the course of its own immediate fortunes after the death of Mahāvīra, that is in the concluding part of the Universal History, as involving a continual tension between decline and attempted reform.

The Vedic background

Jainism emerged, along with Buddhism, towards the end of a time of great social transformation in north India which is usually called the Vedic period after the Veda, the body of literature which in the absence of any large-scale archaeological evidence, forms our main source for this epoch. As Gombrich has provided in his volume on Theravāda Buddhism in this series an authoritative account of Vedic India, it will not be necessary to repeat his conclusions in any detail.⁴ I will, however, give a brief outline of those aspects of this period which have most bearing upon early Jainism.

It has become customary for scholars to interpret the Vedic period as developing in a simple linear fashion. Thus an original nomadic or pastoral life followed from approximately the fifteenth to the tenth centuries BCE by the Āryans, the speakers of the earliest form of that language which was to be called Sanskrit, is usually stated to have been succeeded by the appearance of a more settled, agriculturally orientated mode of life from about the tenth to the sixth centuries BCE, this being followed in turn, through the generation of significant economic surpluses and the concomitant emergence of new forms of technology such as writing and iron, by urbanisation and the gradual appearance of state formations of varying size.

Conveniently enough for scholarship, the literature of this period has generally been interpreted as being composed in conformity to a similar chronologically linear model. This view would see the earliest texts, the Rgveda, hymns of praise and requests directed towards the gods of the Vedic pantheon, along with associated liturgical material, being followed by the Brāhmanas, huge compilations concentrating in the main on the theory of the sacrifice as the main creative force in the universe. These were in turn succeeded by the Āraṇyakas, the esoteric ‘Forest Books’ and the famous Upaniṣads which attempted through mystical speculation to convey the relation between man’s innermost spiritual being and the universe as a whole.

The reality was in fact much more complex than such simple linearity of interpretation would suggest. Pastoralism and settled agriculture, for example, must in actuality have functioned together in tandem for some considerable time, while the Upaniṣads do not simply represent a more spiritual advance on the Brāhmaṇas but are permeated with the ideology and symbols of the sacrificial ritual. Moreover, the beginning of large-scale urbanisation was in the main located in the east of India, originally regarded by Vedic literature as a marginal and impure region, rather than the more westerly areas which represented the heartland of Vedic culture. Nonetheless, it was both the change attendant upon the shift away from less organised forms of economic life and the influence of Vedic ideology which provided the social and intellectual backdrop against which the two great easterners, Mahāvīra and his contemporary, the Buddha, moved.

The dominant mode of conceptualising the world in north India by the sixth century BCE was the product of the elaborate speculation conducted by members of the learned brahman caste into the nature and function of ritual. The Vedic sacrifice, which usually but by no means always involved the killing of animals, was composed of a variety of elements which might be expected to occur in any extended form of ritual activity: priestly specialists, praise of divinities, the making of offerings, requests for divine favours, sacred language, sanctified space in which the rites are conducted and so on. More uniquely, the sacrifice was also regarded as providing the context for consideration of the nature of man’s position in the universe. In the Brāhmaṇas, the theorists of the sacrifice present ritual as a means of perpetuating life, specifically that of the individual who sponsors the performance of the sacrifice, and as a profoundly creative force. The sacrifice came to be seen as implicated in the emergence of both the universe and the individual himself and the Brāhmaṇas demonstrate at length the interrelatedness of the various parts of the ritual and the cosmos.

Two generalised ideas which were to be central for Indian religions resulted from these speculations. The first of these is the world of continuity and rebirth (samsāra), an extension of the idea that the sacrifice could extend existence over more than one life-time. The second idea is generally known as karma, a concept which developed from an original specifically ritual context in which a correctly performed sacrificial action (karman) resulted in birth and continued life in the next world to the generally held view that any action of whatever quality generated rebirth as a consequence. In the Upaniṣads, there also occur the first statements of the view, dominant in Jain teachings and elsewhere, that rebirth is undesirable and that it is possible by controlling or stopping one’s actions to put an end to it and attain a state of deliverance (mokṣa) which lies beyond action.⁵

The Jains, along with the Buddhists, accepted the ideas of karma and rebirth as representing basic facts of human experience, taken for granted in the earliest scriptures with no need being felt to justify their validity. That is not to say that the Jains subscribed to the cult of animal sacrifice itself, for they have always espoused as a central and necessary moral tenet the principle of ahimsā, ‘non-violence’ to all creatures and, indeed, they have contended that even the performance of a sacrifice with an inanimate surrogate is wrong, as in the famous story of Yaśodhara who went to hell because of his innately violent mental disposition, despite having offered to a goddess merely a cockerel made of dough.⁶

Nonetheless, the Jains were also cognisant of the potency of sacrifice as a cultural symbol and sought to reinterpret both Vedic ritual and the brahman sacrificer who manipulated it in their own ethical terms. One of the most venerated Śvetāmbara scriptures describes how Harikeśa, a Jain monk of untouchable origins, approached in silence some brahmans who were performing a sacrifice in order to get alms. On being violently attacked by them, he was saved by a tree-spirit who intervened on his behalf. The climax of the episode is Harikeśa’s explanation to the brahmans of the nature of the true, internal sacrifice of the Jain monk:

Austerity is my sacrificial fire, my life is the place where the fire is kindled. Mental and physical efforts are my ladle for the oblation and my body is the dung fuel for the fire, my actions my firewood. I offer up an oblation praised by the wise seers consisting of my restraint, effort and calm.

(UttS 12.44–5)

Harikeśa’s innate purity has nothing to do with birth or ritual purity but comes about through his celibacy and steadfastness in Jain principles. The heat (tapas) of the sacrificial fire is insignificant compared to the heat generated by the austerity (tapas) which remoulds life and destiny. Spiritual authority is in this context vested not in the ritual technician but in that individual who performs the morally correct action, the Jain monk.

Going forth: the institution of world renunciation

If, as it came to be believed, freedom from action, initially taken as ritual performance and then extended to include social action, was the means of escaping from the continuity of rebirth, how was such an actionless state to be achieved? The answer was that the individual had to cast off the bonds of the householder’s life, the world of the cooking and sacrificial fires, and enter the life of homelessness by becoming a renouncer, a wandering mendicant who could not grow, cook or buy his own food but instead subsisted on alms. The term śramaṇa, ‘striver’, used of Mahāvīra and other renouncers to distinguish them from the brahmans, whether priests or renouncers, points to the physical and speculative exertion which was necessarily entailed in a life devoted to the minimising of the performance of external action and an accompanying control of inner activity.

It may well be that this ‘going forth’ (pravrajyā) from home, an institution which was to be so productive for Indian religious life and thought, was given impetus by the changes which Indian society was undergoing from around the eighth century BCE and that the growth of communities of renouncers with their evolving doctrines and codes of conduct was a response to the breakdown of old social values in the face of aggressive new state formations and altered modes of social interaction and authority. However, while the Śvetāmbara scriptural text, the ‘Exposition of Explanations’, does preserve a memory of this period in a description couched in mythical terms of two conflicts called ‘The War of the Big Stones’ and ‘The War of the Chariot and the Mace’ in which the famous sixth-century BCE king of Magadha, Kūṇika (called by the Buddhists Ajātaśatru) destroyed a confederation of smaller kingdoms and tribes (Bh 7.9),⁷ early Jain literature shows very little interest in contemporary political circumstances and the question of some kind of psychological malaise or sense of anomie as constituting an influence on those who went forth to become mendicant renouncers can only remain hypothetical.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that one of the most noteworthy features of world renunciation was its construction of alternative forms of social groupings akin to those of the world which had been left behind. Terms employed in Jainism and Buddhism to describe groups of ascetics such as gana, ‘troop’, and sangha, ‘assembly’, are used in early Vedic texts to refer to the warrior brotherhoods, the young men’s bands which were a feature of Āryan nomadic life, and the stress found in the old codes of monastic law on requirements of youth, physical fitness and good birth for Jain and Buddhist monks, along with the frequent martial imagery of Jainism and its repeated stress on the crushing of spiritual enemies, may point to a degree of continuity with these earlier types of warrior. Certainly it is noteworthy that both Mahāvīra and the Buddha were members of the warrior caste.⁸ The career of Mahāvīra in particular, and countless Jain ascetics after him, bears witness to a form of spiritual heroism and struggle which struck an empathetic chord within an ancient Indian cultural world where the martial values of the warrior were widely esteemed.

While the most ancient ideal of Jainism, as represented in Mahāvīra’s early ascetic career recorded in the scriptures, was isolation and solitary asceticism, going forth did not in actuality mean entry into an anarchic, unstructured world but rather entailed joining a new form of society with its own rules, internal relationships and groupings which in many respects replicated those of the social world which had been abandoned. The only major difference was the requirement for ascetic society to reproduce itself by means of recruitment and initiation since there was a necessary obligation for all renouncers to abandon sexual activity.⁹ One of the most frequently used terms as late as the sixteenth century CE to describe a Śvetāmbara monastic group was kula, ‘family’.

The ‘Sayings of the Seers’

Jainism, then, was in origin merely one component of a north Indian ascetic culture which flourished in the Ganges basin from around the eighth or seventh centuries BCE. Many individual participants within this culture had attained a marked degree of fame at this time, acknowledged by Jains and Buddhists alike, because of their supposed attainment of some form of knowledge or enlightenment,¹⁰ and one early text provides particularly valuable evidence of how an attempt was made by the Jains to establish some sort of accommodation with non-Jain ascetics, both contemporary and ancient.

The ‘Sayings of the Seers’ (IBh) is seldom referred to in studies on Jainism, not only because it is often difficult to understand but because its provenance and purpose are unclear. It contains a series of statements attributed to a variety of ṛṣi or seers (the term in origin referred to a composer of a Vedic hymn), some familiar from other sources, others almost totally obscure, but all clearly regarded as in some way significant and authoritative in their own right. Unquestionably the ‘Sayings’ is one of the most ancient Jain texts available. However, with a very provisional dating to the second or first centuries BCE in terms of its redaction, it probably cannot be assigned to the very oldest stratum of the literature, although it does give the impression of drawing on more ancient sources, as witness its treatment of the teacher Pārśva, who came to be accepted as Mahāvīra’s predecessor as fordmaker. Never completely forgotten, the ‘Sayings of the Seers’ seems nonetheless to have fallen at a fairly early date into a partial obscurity, with very few manuscripts of the text being copied and no classical commentary on it being composed.¹¹

The subject matter of the ‘Sayings’ must have been the reason for this, for it juxtaposes Mahāvīra along with Pārśva on equal terms with figures from traditions which were to be regarded as Jainism’s rivals, such as the Buddha’s close disciples Śāriputra and Mahākāśyapa (the Buddha himself does not appear), various individuals from a brahmanical background such as Yājñavalkya, one of the pre-eminent teachers of the Upaniṣads, and even Makkhali Gosāla whom later Jain writers were to see as the archenemy of Mahāvīra (see below).

Mahāvīra’s teachings are presented, under his given name of Vardhamāna, at no great length and in no privileged manner. Suppression of the senses is given as the central tenet of his doctrine, sacrificial imagery being used to convey this: ‘he who conquers the mind and the passions and performs austerity correctly shines with pure soul like a fire in which the oblation has been poured’ (IBh 29.17).

It is not Mahāvīra but the mysterious figure of Nārada, who in classical Hinduism was to assume the role of a semi-divine intermediary between gods and men and whom the Jain Universal History linked with disproof of the efficacy of sacrifice, who is credited at the beginning of the ‘Sayings’ with enunciating the central teaching of the importance of non-violence in body, speech and mind (IBh l). The ‘Sayings’ also contain what would have been to the Jains antipathetical cosmological views such as those of the wandering mendicant (parivrājaka) Giri who is associated with two claims, that the world and all life came about through a heated egg germinating in the cosmic waters and that the world was the product of the sacrifice, statements which are then followed somewhat uneasily with an enunciation of the standard Jain view of the eternality of the universe (IBh 37).

Particularly interesting is the section of the ‘Sayings’ which describes how the brahman mendicant Ambaḍa is instructed that mere renunciation of the world is insufficient and that it requires to be put into the framework of correct Jain behaviour (IBh 25). In another later Śvetāmbara scriptural text, Ambaḍa is described as the leader of a band of ascetics who resolve on suicide because they cannot find anybody to give them alms. Before dying the ascetics pay homage both to Ambada and Mahāvīra and are reborn as gods. Mahāvīra praises Ambaḍa but emphasises that, despite his great qualities, it is impossible for him to become a Jain monk because his behaviour only approximates to the necessa...