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SCRIPTURAL COMMENTARY IN ŚVETĀMBARA JAINISM
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himself to supplement his preaching and subsequently formed the basis of the now lost Sinhalese commentaries upon which the fifth century CE exegete Buddhaghosa drew, there is no evidence to support the historicity of this.24 Nonetheless, early acceptance of the necessity of some sort of reflection upon or explanation of the teachings can be seen in the assertion of what is perhaps the oldest Jain scripture, the Ācārānga Sūtra, that “the great man, whose mind is not on external things, should know the doctrine by the doctrine, either through his own intelligence or through the explanation of another or through hearing it in the vicinity of others."25
The term “śruta”, “what has been heard”, which eventually developed in Jain philosophy to have the sense of any spoken or written symbol, seems in its earliest usage to have roughly corresponded in meaning to "scripture", in the same manner as śruti in Hinduism denotes the totality of revealed truth as embodied in the Veda.26 Śrutajñāna, in Jain epistemology denoting in slightly blurred fashion both “knowledge of scripture" and "knowledge located within scripture”, 27 is dependent upon those who reveal it and at the same time reveals the truth itself. It is conditioned by a wide and fluctuating range of karmic influences (technically called kṣāyopaśamika) and thus requires correct and controlled modes of interpretation.28 Haribhadra (eighth century) makes clear the broad issue involved:
Even though śruta is transmitted to those (who are capable of adopting and maintaining correct practice), human beings cannot gain the desired result (artha) from that (statement) whose meaning (artha) is not (fully and correctly) understood. Because of that, anuyoga of the words of the enlightened teachers is undertaken.29
Anuyoga means “conjoining" each significant word in a scriptural text with its broadest connotative context and thus bringing it into full association with the complexity of reality.30 The standard techniques for employing this particular hermeneutical methodology are enshrined in the Anuyogadvārāni, “The Doors to Anuyoga” (c. third/fourth century CE), itself a canonical work, which demonstrates their applicability to the central text of Jain ritual practice, the Āvasyaka Sūtra.31 However, it seems clear that some basic operations of Jain scriptural analysis must have becn established earlier than the Anuyogadvārāni, in one case w win the canon itself,32 and the history of the oldest scriptural commentaries, the Präkrit verse niryuktis, which play an important part in implementing the anuyoga process, does suggest that exegesis evolved in tandem with the gradual standardisation of the scriptures.
According to the Āvasyaka Niryukti, a commentary on the Āvasyaka Sūtra which has achieved virtual canonical status, a niryukti is “a treatise