Somnolent Stras Sriptural Cmmentary In Svetambara Jainism

SR No.: 269690
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Paul Dundas
Publisher: Paul Dundas
Total Pages: 29
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 4 MB

Page 17

SCRIPTURAL COMMENTARY IN ŚVETĀMBARA JAINISM
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or false belief, comes about when one does not believe every syllable preached by the Jinas.102 Unfortunately, heretics fail to appreciate that inference, rather than mere literalist reliance on a root text, is often required in order to see the authority of commentary, as a result of which their sūtra-derived standpoints are based on merely a crude, transactional (vyavahāra) model of reality. 103
CONCLUDING REMARKS: SCRIPTURE, COMMENTARY AND SVETĀMBARA
JAINISM
The production by Abhayadeva Sūri of his commentaries upon the nine angas appears to have been regarded by contemporaries as a defining doctrinal point for medieval Svetămbara Jainism, the moment when apparent inexorable decline was arrested and a standard for correct understanding and practice reconfirmed. Ironically, the danger which Dharmasāgara saw himself as combatting at the end of the sixteenth century was not inability to understand the sūtras but an all too eager desire to read them and attempt to put them into practice. In rejecting the literalist lay-inspired approach to scripture which ignored the guiding assistance of authoritative ascetic-derived commentary, effectively the only instrument by which heresy could be kept at bay, and in advocating in hardline fashion the centrality of correct teacher succession, Dharmasāgara clearly believed, like the desert fathers of early Christianity, that only those qualified by virtue of their spiritual practice were entitled to interpret the scripture. 104 To invoke more recent Christian history, Dharmasāgara might well have recognised a similar situation in respect to sacred texts in the European Reformation, of which he was a near contemporary, where an original reforming doctrine of “sola scriptura” was soon counterbalanced by the understanding that scripture had to be protected from maladroit interpretation by various exegetical institutions, thus ensuring that in the last resort it could and should only be fully understood by the specialist. 105
As Abhayadeva Sūri himself pointed out, lack of a commentary is not sufficient in itself to establish the non-canonicity of a sütra. 106 It is also obvious enough from examining manuscript catalogues that by no means all copies of the Jain scriptures were transmitted in the late medieval: period with accompanying exegesis. During the twentieth century, a variety of perspectives about the manner in which scripture should be presented have been present within the Jain community and the question has sometimes led to serious tension within the dominant Svetāmbara subsect, the Tapā Gaccha. So, one party, associated with the renowned