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The Jaina Universe in a Profile of Cosmic Man
- Suzuko Ohira This is a short artilce I sent to the Umāsvāti Seminar held in Delhi in January 1999 which I could not participate in. Very fortunately it has not been published yet, and I am indeed happy to dedicate it for the commemoration volume of my late dear teacher Pt. D. D. Malvania, who guided me in writing my Ph.D. thesis, "A study of the Tattāvarthasūtra with Bhāsya, with Special Reference to Authorship and Date" (pub. by L. D. Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad, 1982) and "A Study of the Bhagavtisūtra — A Chronological Analysis” (pub. by Prakrit Text Society, Ahmedabad, 1994). In this brief paper, I would like to pose upon the Cosmic Manshaped Jaina loka in order to speculate when and why such a strange idea of the universe arose to the Jaina theoreticians, and if Umāsvāti was aware of its singificance.
Umāsvāti's T.S., that was composed sometimes in the late middle of the 5th century A.D., is a compendium of the theoretical contents of massive Jaina canonical works. He organized it in terms of seven tattvas in some 350 sūtras, and wrote its commentary or bhāsya himself. Since then, it has become a common practice for the students of Jainology, to be introduced to the outline of Jainism through his Sabhāsya T.S However, this prakarana, written in terse Sanskrit is extremely difficult to comprehend, even with the help of his own bhāsya, and naturally numerous commentaries have been continuously written on it up to this day. Students of Jainism today have to thus take up the Sabhāsya T.S., as a rule, along with some modern commentaries on it at the very beginning of their Jainological studies.
It is in these modern commentaries on the T.S. that we find an exposition of the Jaina loka built in the form of
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