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Personal Biography in Jaina Literature : 105
Even though many Jains were merchants with international tradingties, the religion itself remained local. Jainism seems to have maintained an introversion not found with the other much more extrovert Indian religions. Therefore, to study the rise of this new biographical turn in Indian literature with a focus on the tradition of Jainism may allow a particular understanding of this literary phenomenon in relative isolation from outside influences, thus enabling a better understanding of its nature and character. In the following pages, I shall first briefly survey the overall development of biography in earlier Jaina literature, providing a picture thereof which may also be so familiar to the reader from Buddhist literature. Thereupon, I will turn to present and discuss the appearance of personal biography in Jaina literature in some detail. Although the underlying question of my study is broadly to understand the circumstances that led to the appearance of personal biography in Indian literature, this paper remains quite limited in this attempt, seeking merely to gain a basic overview of the genre and its appearance in Jainism, while suggesting a few possible venues for further inquiry. 1. Proto-Biographies in the Early Canon The Jaina canonical literature of both the Svetāmbara and the Digambara sects contain proto-biographies, mainly depicting the lives of Mahāvīra and other Tīrthankaras. These may be called "proto”-biographies, since they are not written in the form of separate biographical texts bearing any genre-specific titles, such as caritra or prabhāvaka, as seen with later biographies. In the Svetāmbara canon, the oldest written layer of the canonical literature dates, according to JACOBI (1884 : xliii), to the 3rd 2nd century BCE. The Āyārāngasutta (Skt. Ācārārgasūtra) in its first book, viz. the first Suyakkhandha (Skt. Śrutaskandha), ends with a versified account of Mahāvīra's behavior and austerities, which JACOBI (1884 : xlviii) dates slightly later than the preceding segments of the same text. This account, however, is not an actual biography aiming to provide a chronological outline of a person's
| SR No. | 525075 |
| Book Title | Sramana 2011 01 |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Sundarshanlal Jain, Shreeprakash Pandey |
| Publisher | Parshvanath Vidhyashram Varanasi |
| Publication Year | 2011 |
| Total Pages | 172 |
| Language | Hindi |
| Classification | Magazine, India_Sramana, & India |
| File Size | 15 MB |