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
Jain household, and are sung by the participants of the rituals, are an important way in which the Jains understand their own religious history and beliefs. Babb rightly emphasizes that any ethnographic study of the Jains must take these and other written sources as centrally important, given the high level of education and intellectual sophistication among the Jains. As he states the issue baldly, “He or she who would understand Jain life must read what Jains themsevles read.” In this basic methodological approach, Babb's work marks a distinct advance over many other fieldwork studies of the Jains that have paid insufficient attention to these vernacular written sources. It may well be the single most important of the fieldwork studies of the Jains published to date.
Studies of ritual of necessity involve discussions not only of the actions being performed and the actors performing those actions, but also of the objects towards whom the actions are directed. In the Jain case, these are both the liberated Jinas or Tirthankars and various unliberated gods, goddesses, and mendicants. A translation of several contemporary Jain understandings of the theological nature of the Jina is provided at Cort 1995c, and Zydenbos 1993 provides an historical overview of Jain understandings of divinity. Discussions of Jain goddesses are found at Cort 1987 and Zydenbos 1992 and 1994. Cort 1995d looks at the god Ganesa, whom the Jains share with the Hindus and Buddhists, and Cort 1997 and 2000d study the powerful North Gujarati Jain god Ghantākarn Mahāvīr. Babb (1993) and Laidlaw (1985) study the distinctly Khartar Gacch cult of the Dādāgurus, a composite set of four deceased wonderworking monks who are still worshipped for worldly favours. Some of the ways in which Jain rituals can also involve devotion directed to abstract concepts are seen in Cort (forthcoming-a). Other relevant historical studies include those of Orr (1999, 2000a, 2000b), who examines the character of Jain worship in medieval Tamil Nadu as revealed in inscriptional evidence; Dundas (1998), who reveals the extent to which Jains were deeply involved in mantric and tantric practices; and several articles by Phyllis Granoff (1991a, 1992a, 1994-95, 1998b, 1998c) that provide insight into Jain lay temple-builders and responses to Muslim iconoclasm. Two articles by the art historian Catherine Asher (1999, 2001) investigate the setting of pūjā, looking at Digambar temples in Delhi and Jaipur.
Many of the temples in which Jains worship images of the Jinas and other deities are found at the hundreds of Jain pilgrimage shrines throughout India. The Jains have a rich tradition of pilgrimage that is only beginning to be
studied. Granoff (1992b, 1994a) has studied some medieval narrative accounts