Tenth Wonder Domestication And Reform In Medieval Svetambara Jainism

SR No.: 269515
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Paul Dundas
Publisher: Paul Dundas
Total Pages: 14
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 2 MB

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Paul Dundas
ascetics, who got their livelihood from their external appearance only and who were attached to this world and uninterested in the next, had many temples built in that particular region. And after having temples built which were repositories for images alone, they had well appointed (susilittha) monasteries constructed nearby and lived there at their ease ».
The institution of living near or, as it subsequently became, within temples is thus ascribed to the chicanery of lax monks and the unwitting collusion of their lay followers. While the Kharatara Gaccha did not actually proscribe the erection of temples 14, as a sect such as the Sthānakvāsis were to do, its leaders clearly felt considerable unease about their role in the corruption of the sangha. Jinadattasüri (twelfth-thirteenth cent.) gives a list of negative motives for building temples, referring to Queen Kuntalā 15, who, as Jineśvara recounts, attempted, because of her pride in her own temple, to restrict the practice of devotions in the temples built by her co-queens and, as a result of her own lack of true devotion, was reborn as a black bitch who lived in that same temple 16.
Kharatara tradition has it that in 1024 A.D. Jineśvarasūri defeated in debate a caityavāsin monk named Sūra at Anahillapațţana in Gujarat in front of King Durlabha, an event which in some accounts is said to have led to the epithet Kharatara, « Particularly Quick-witted », being bestowed upon Jineśvara and, subsequently, the sect 17. While we may treat with some suspicion the arguments of Dharmasāgara (sixteenth cent.) who, as a stern advocate of the supremacy of his sect, the Tapā Gaccha, suggested that the debate, so important to the Kharatara chroniclers, had never taken place at all 18, the fullest account we possess, that of
14. See JINADATTASORI, Carcari 15. . 15. Sandehadolāvaliprakarana, p. 7a. 16. Kathäkoşaprakarana, p. 129, lines 30-2 to p. 130, line 14.
17. See W. SCHUBRING, Die Lehre der Jainas, Berlin and Leipzig, 1935, p. 47.
18. Pravacanapariksā, Surat, 1937, pp. 270-1.