Jambu Jyoti

SR No.: 006503
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi Ahmedabad
Publication Year: 2004
Total Pages: 448
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Philosophy, & Religion
File Size: 21 MB

Page 131

M. A. Dhaky
Jambū-jyoti
recluses59. (The Vyayahāra also mentions pāņipratigrahadhāri [bowl-less mendicants] and Pratigrahadhāri [in essence monks using a begging-bowl]). These terms, on the other hand and, significantly, are absent in the āgamas of the pre-Christian Era. What is more, there is here noticeable a scholastic approach and classificatory tendencies about the kalpa-sthitis which do not seem compatible to, or correspond with the much simpler and straightforward (but very stern) ideals held, and the precise rules laid down for the acela or nude friars and, by contradistinction, for the sacela friars (in that early age having minimal allowable possession for them) in the undoubted oldest strata of the earlier agamas such as the Acārānga Book I. Even the style and phraseology of these specific kalpa-sthiti passages in the Kalpa widely differ from those of the rest of the text. These passages apparently had been introduced at some point in time from somewhat later and different, yet relatively ancient, source. These formidable facts raise the first solid suspicion on the supposedly high antiquity of the Kalpa and the Vyavahāra and their authorship ascribed to Bhadrabāhu.
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2) Both of these works reflect a highly developed state of organization of the Nirgrantha clergy, as also a well-established as well as much proliferated monastic church. On the testimony of the third phase of the Sthaviravali (c. A. D.100) of the Paryuṣaṇā-kalpa, the first ganas or organized bands of friars and mendicants (nigganthas, bhikkhus) and nuns (nigganthis, bhikkūṇīs) progressively began to be instituted some 50 years or so posterior to Bhadrabāhu* and had diversified further, indeed considerably so into śākhās and kulas by, and even before, the first two centuries of the Christian Era. The ganas, in the next stage, also were further divided into sambhoga-groups60. The Vyavahāra refers to this latter term which, however, nowhere appears in the earlier canonical literature including even the Acārānga Book II (c. Ist cent. B.C.-A. D.): It does figure though in ★ A late Sātavāhana inscription in one of the Junnar caves in Maharashtra refers to "Siddh-gane Aparajite." [Cf. S. Nagraju, Buddhist Architecture of Western India, (C. 250 B.C.-A.D. 300), Delhi 1981, "Appendix: List of Brahmi Inscriptions from the Rock-cut monuments of Western India," p. 331, Ins. no. 10.] If the Aparajita noted here is the grand preceptor of Bhadrabahu, then the convention for the gana formation may have started a few decades earlier. The whole problem needs further investigation. (This gana has not been noticed even from an early literary source. It is noted late in the Southern work, the Śrutavatāra [c. 10th cent.].)