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FACETS OF JAINA RELIGIOUSNESS
Indian history.
The theory and practice of renunciation cultivated first by the śramaņas and then in the post-Buddhist period by the brāhmaṇas also, inspired over centuries a large and significant body of ascetic literature, especially ascetic poetry, in Pali, Prakrit, and Sanskrit languages. The main subject of this ascetic poetry is soteriological and relating to the quest of transcendental emancipation. Soteriology includes doctrines as well as methods of salvation and emancipation. Methods of soteriology include cultivation of the faculty of faith, ascetic practices, meditational excercises, scriptural studies, intense reflection, control of passions, renunciation of desires, intellectual analysis and comprehension of phenomena of existence, attainment of wisdom, and so on. Almost all these techniques have been cultivated and developed by the śramanas or ascetic sages of the Jaina tradition, and the extant literature of Jainism in Prakrit and Sanskrit offers us rich materials for their study.
One of these techniques of soteriological development, repeatedly discussed and described in Jaina texts, is known as anuprekşā. We have ventured to translate this word as "soteriological reflection". Here we propose to make a preliminary study of twelve themes of anuprekşā mainly on the basis of a few important Jaina treatises in Prakrit and Sanskrit, but we will not hesitate to refer to some cognate terms and related concepts found in Buddhist texts in Pali and Sanskrit. Our study will be confined to ethical and soteriological functions of anuprekṣā themes within the range of traditional list of twelve themes.
I. j. THE SERIES OF TWELVE THEMES
Some of the important texts which we have consulted show differences in the order of enumeration of twelve themes of anuprekşā.
2. The author has discussed some of these points in his forthcoming articles on "Asceticism" and
"Renunciation" contributed to the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism in preparation at the Punjabi
University, Patiala. 3. Ācārya Ātmārāmaji has shown the canonical basis of most of the themes of anupreksa in his
publication Tattvarthasūtra : Jaināgamasamanvaya (second impression, 1941), pp. 180-181, Walther Schubring, The Doctrine of the Jainas, tr. by W. Beurlen (1962), pp. 307-308, also points to several passages in canonical texts which went into the making of the list of twelve themes. A.N. Upadhye's edition of the Kārttikeyānupreksa (1960), Introduction, pp. 11-39, gives a good literary history of anuprekşā. K.K. Handiqui, Yaśastilaka and Indian Culture, 291-315, has elucidated some aspects of Jaina ascetic poetry. A large number of texts on this subject are briefly cited by Jinendra Varņi in his encyclopaedic compendium called Jainendra-Siddhanta-Kosa, Part I (1970), pp. 73-81. As far as this writer knows, no manual of anuprekṣās has been translated into English so far.
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