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120 : Śramaņa, Vol 62, No. 1 January-March 2011
To consider some possible answers to this complex question, one explanation may have been the way in which the Svetāmbara sect from the 11th century onwards began to splinter into several subsects. GRANOFF (1999:297) has noted that she has "sought to understand the compiling of certain collections of stories, didactic and biographical, the line is not always so finely drawn, as a response to a deeply-felt need to create a community self-image that would transcend the many dividing borders that were rapidly coming to criss-cross the religious map of Svetāmbara Jainism." In other words, by writing biographies of beloved teachers that any Śvetāmbara group would consider their own, a sense of common heritage and unity could be produced in the otherwise divided Svetāmbara community. Whether such an explanation would also be true for the production of Digambara biographies, such as Prabhācandra's Kathākośa discussed above, remains to be seen. Yet, it is a fact that Śvetāmbara biographical texts far outnumber the Digambara writings of this genre. Another circumstance that could have created a need for a clearer sense of heritage and for the authority of an authentic transmission could have been the many political alliances with royal courts that Jaina monks were beginning to maintain. After the end of the Gupta Empire in the 7th century, the political landscape of India fragmented into many smaller kingdoms. The Pāla Dynasty (770850) brought a brief state of partial unity, which was quickly replaced by another breakup into petty kingdoms. This environment must have put more stress on leaders of the Jaina community to establish donor-relations and religious-political alliances with many more rulers than with just a single monarch of a large empire. In view of this, access to narrative about eminent Jaina monks who had performed miracles for their kingly patrons would certainly have been useful for the Jaina monks residing at the royal courts. Stories of this kind figure prominently in many Jaina biographies. The theme is, for example, reflected in the many accounts of Siddhasena Divākara's miracle of manifesting a Pārsvanātha image out of a Hindu statue or a linga before the eyes
| 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 |