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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Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature
of divinity. Babb (1988, 1996, 1998b) studies the rite in the context of broader South Asian rituals of giving, both to deities and to living mendicants, and shows how the underlying paradigm of the Jain rite, in contradistinction to most other prestations, is not so much a matter of giving anything to the Jina as it is a matter of the Jain worshipper giving up worldly possessions in a symbolic form of renunciation. In several articles (1991a, 1994, 1995b) I have discussed the Jain ritual in a phenomonelogical context as linked to an aesthetics of ritual action, and in the context of Jain rituals more generally as embodying a liturgical paradox, of Jains using ritual action as part of the path of attaining the Jain salvific goal of liberation, defined as a state of total inaction. Kelting (1999, 2001b) focuses upon the phenomenon in Pune that most larger public pūjās and mahāpūjās are run by women's mandals, or devotional singing "circles;” in particular, she shows that while the sponsors oftentimes feel that through donation they are generating merit, the women's mandals instead emphasize proper devotional spirit coupled with their own ritual expertise as being the cause for the ritual's efficacy.
Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw's 1994 The Archetypal Actions of Ritual uses reflections upon the Mūrtipūjak eightfold pūjā to attempt to provide a new theoretical framework for thinking about ritual in general. Ritual, according to the authors, is a very different form of action from most human activity. The latter tends to be highly instrumental, with the action expressing the intention of the actor; but in ritual, this connection is broken, so that there is usually no natural link between the action and the intention. Ritual, then, is action in which normal intentionality has been modified or even eliminated. For example, the actions of my fingers upon the keyboard are directly related to my intention to write these comments, and the relationship between cause and effect is fairly transparent to any reasonable observer. This is not the however, when one offers a flower before an image of a Jina. There is no inherent relationship between this action and the actor's intentions—we remain as ignorant of the actor's intentions after the action as we were before--and there might be as many intentions (and therefore meanings) as there are actors. As a result, the authors conclude, ritual actions are so symbolically polysemous as to be meaningless.
Ritual, according to the authors, "is a quality of action, and not a class of events or institutions." They go on to amplify this by sayinh, "ritualization