Sramana 2011 01

SR No.: 525075
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

Page 137

Personal Biography in Jaina Literature : 119
are not given in chronological order, since Pātrakeśarin and Akalanka, who both belong to the 8th century, postdate Samantabhadra (ca. 2nd century CE) with six centuries. Yet, as authors whose thought may have been significant to Prabhācandra, the three biographies could be seen as a sequence expressing a certain intellectual heritage in a line ending with Samantabhadra and his student Sivārya, whose work Prabhācandra is setting out to illustrate at this point in the text. This remains, however, merely a hypothesis, the validity of which can only be determined by a much more indepth study of Prabhācandra's relationship to these three authors. If meant to provide a sense of heritage, the beginning of personal biography in Jaina literature might be seen as related to the importance of lineage and to the authority of holding an unbroken transmission. In Buddhist literature, where personal biography began within the context of the Tāntric tradition, the earliest biographies were either accounts of Tāntric lineages or life-stories of major figures considered to be founders of various Tāntric transmissions.53 It is possible that a similar emphasis on heritage and lineage was significant for the appearance of personal biography in Jaina literature. 54
In this case, personal biography ought to be, at least partly, traceable to the Jaina genres of lineage-records, the so-called Avali-texts mentioned above, which were accounts of the transmission-lines of mendicant initiation (dīkņā). While in their earliest form such records, e.g., the Therāvali found in the Kalpasūtra, did not include biographies, CORT (1995:482) notes that biography began to be included already in Hemacandra's Sthavirāvalīcarita, “Lives of the Line of Elders," written in 1160-1172 CE. Likewise, later āvali-texts often came to include personal biographies (CORT, 1995:482). This development in the avali-literature thus paralleled the rise of the personal biographies listed in the survey above, and this fact may further highlight a desire for heritage and in extension thereof a need for pedigree as significant factors. Yet, what was it in the 11th-12th centuries that gave rise to such needs?