History of Jaina Monachism

Author(s): S B Deo
Publisher: Deccan College Research Institute

Page 30

HISTORY OF JAINA MONACHISM
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ed from that quarter grew less in the same measure as time advanced and the institutions of the sect were more firmly established. Of more interest to a young monk seems to have been an accurate knowledge of animate and inanimate things, as a rather long treatise on this subject has been added at the end of the book" 59
The Avasyakasutra, however, has not retained its pure form inasmuch as it has come down to us only in a mixed state along with the Niryukti. It may therefore be admitted that it is very difficult to fix any date or ascribe roughly the possibility of a particular period of compilation to this text. For want of any other evidence or due to the absence of a critical edition, the material in it has been incorporated, in the present thesis, along with the previously mentioned texts of this group even though there is a possibility of getting information of a later phase of Jaina monachism in the text of the Avasyaka.
The probable dating of the fourth Mülasūtra-The Pinda or sometimes the Ogha niryukti-, will be discussed at a later stage when we come to the Niryuktis as a whole.
From the available evidence on which the above discussion regarding the possible dating of the Angas and the Mūlasūtras has been done, it may be said that these two groups of texts seem to reveal the state of Jaina monachism from about the times of Mahavira to roughly the fourth century B.C.
The Chedasūtras:
The group of six texts going under the name of the Chedasūtras 'did not, perhaps, form a group in the Canon until a late period, as it is not always the same texts which are placed in the group'.60
Amongst these six texts, only the three-Dasü, Kappa and Vavahāra -are frequently referred to as a single unit, and the tradition says that Bhadrabahu who "is said to have been the sixth Thera after Mahavira, and to have died 170 years after Mahāvīra's Nirvana,61 culled the material for these texts from the ninth Purvā.62 As we have no knowledge of the contents of the Pūrvās as they are said to be extinct long back, we have to
59. JACOBI, SBE, Vol. XIV, Intr., p. xxxix.
60. WINTERNIRZ, op. cit., pp. 461-62; "The Pinda-Nijjutti and Oha-Nijjutti are also occasionally classed among the Cheda-sutras'; Ibid., p. 465.
61. lbid., p. 462.
62. Ṛshimandalastotra, v. 166, in support of this quoted by SHAH, op. cit., p. 233, f. n. 7. BULL. DCRI.-4
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