________________
3TTEET-810 • 102 World-Man or Cosmic Man, standing with his legs apart and resting his hand on his waist. The same exposition is, however, not found in the earlier ones. Umāsvāti describes the shape of loka in his bhāsya to sūtra III. 6 in the following way. The lower world stands in ākāśa like a down turned earthen bowl, the middle world is in the shape of a cymbal (jhālara), and the upper world is also like a drum (mrdanga). The whole universe is, then, said to resemble a vajra, which means, according to Monier William's Sanskrit Dictionary (p. 913), the form of two transverse bolts crossing each other like this.
His description of the loka above as well as that of its structure and dimension made in the T.S. and its bhāsya, Chs.III-IV, do not contradict those made in the modern works, except the unit of “rajju' in measuring the loka, which is the post-Umāsvāti usage. An illustration of this Jaina loka, for instance, shown in Figure 1, may naturally arouse our imagination that it resembles a human being, having his head on top and his hands at the part of waist that falls in the position of the middle world. But Umāsvāti does not compare it to Cosmic Man as modern commentators on the T.S. do. Neither do so the early commentators of the T.S., both Svetāmbara and Digambara, including Haribhadra, Pūjyapāda and Akalarka, whose works I hold. I shall be most happy if any scholar would be kind enough to inform me, of the earlier works on the T.S. or otherwise that refer to the Jiana loka expressed in human appearance.
Schubring mentions in The Doctrine of the Jainas (p.206), “A third non-canonical conception refers to a world of human appearance (as loke puruṣa)". (1) He, then, makes a note that an expressly female figure appearing in Grünwedel's AltKutscha, I. 47, etc. is quite doubtful. True, an idea of the loka in a profile of Cosmic Woman can never be accepted
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
