Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature

Author(s): Vasantkumar Bhatt, Jitendra B Shah, Dinanath Sharma
Publisher: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi Ahmedabad

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Recent Fieldwork Studies of the Contemporary Jains
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criteria, but nonetheless advance it as a useful formal category. They look at one obvious indigenous category, that of caste, to see if it is sufficient to account for community, and conclude that while caste is an important aspect of Jain community, it is not sufficient by itself. They also look at more recent voluntary associations of Jains, and find that while they have been influential in specific regions and specific times, there is insufficient continuity in this influence for these associations to serve as the basis of community. In sum, they conclude that community serves as much to define "potential" and "imagined communities” (echoing Anderson 1991) as to define actual communities; but the fact that the communities are only rarely realized in full does not render the idea of Jain community itself unreal.
In TAOL, the Indologists Mukund Lath and K. R. Norman present studies based on single texts from the extensive genre of normative manuals of lay practice known śrāvakācāras. (This genre is also explored in Cort 1991c, where these medieval texts are contrasted with twentieth-century narratives of ideal laymen as merchant princes. This latter topic is further explored by Steven Heim in his University of Chicago dissertation-in-progress on biographies of the thirteenth century śvetāmbar layman Vastupāla). These manuals present an ideological model of Jain lay behaviour that is in part a lay reflection of the asceticism of the mendicants, and in part presents the laity with the responsibility for materially sustaining the mendicant community. Lath discusses the tenth century C. E. Upasākādhyayana, composed by the Digambar Somadevasūri, who presents a model of behaviour designed to minimize harm and maximize nonharm, and thereby to improve the individual's karmic status. A discussion of duties involves Somadeva in a lengthy discussion of the relative weight of the individual's duties (dharma) to his fellow Jains and his duties to the broader society. The dilemma of contrasting social and religious dharmas is resolved for the Jain ideologue by resorting to a Jain version of a two-truth model, in which the ultimate truth of the Jain path to liberation supercedes the relative truth of worldly norms. K. R. Norman investigates the prescribed role of the Jain layman according to a much earlier Svetämbar text, the canonical Uvāsagadasão. In this text we see that whereas the great vows (mahi taken by all mendicants are intended to direct the mendicant towards liberation in this lifetime through the elimination of all karmic influx, the lesser vows (anuvrata) of the layperson are instead directed towards gaining the layperson a better next life through the minimizing of negative karma (pāpa) and the