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even within the fold of the sect called advocate-of-no-clothing or Digambara there have been numerous orders or sub-sects which are not unanimous on the question as to whether the absolute renunciation of an external possession is or is not a part of a monk's practice. Thus here there have been sub-sects which while theoretically advocating nakedness and the use of hands as utensils in practice did accept some external possession or other. In a way they represented the mild or moderate wing of the party of no-clothing. Side by side, there were other sub-sects which theoretically advocated just nakedness and in practice too adopted the same. It is they who represented the hard or extreme wing of the party of no-clothing. It too appears that all these sects adopted in common the practice of using hands as utensils-which is why they were all considered to be Digambara. It was natural that in the texts composed by the scholars or monks belonging to these different sub-sects representing a moderate or an extreme wing mutually conflicting views be expressed on the questions of nakedness, clothes etc. Besides, there were orders like Yapaniya which were not considered either a full-fledged adherent of the party of clothes or that of the party of no-clothing. And when such orders disappeared from the scene then several texts composed by the masters belonging to them which specially favoured the Śvetambara sect were chiefly safeguarded by this sect while several of them remained current only within the fold of the Digambara sect and in due course came to be looked upon as Digambarite. So if in the texts composed by the scholars belonging to the different Digambara sub-sects-some old and some medieval, some moderate and some extremist-there is at places found an absolute defence of nakedness and at places a defence of a limited acceptance of external possessions-then there is nothing anomalous about it. At present there is predominence within the Digambara sect of the ideas advocated by the subsect Terapantha with its absolute defence of nakedness, ideas which are a growth of the past two to three hundred years. Exclusively on the basis of these ideas it is never possible to find an explanation for all the old texts
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| SR No. | 006796 |
| Book Title | Tattvartha Sutra |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Sukhlal Sanghavi, K K Dixit |
| Publisher | L D Indology Ahmedabad |
| Publication Year | 2000 |
| Total Pages | 596 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English, Tattvartha Sutra, & Tattvarth |
| File Size | 10 MB |