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JAIN DIGEST. Winter 2007
Introduction to the paper Jaina Monks From Mathura: Literary Evidence for Their Identification On Kushana Sculptures By Padmanabh S. Jaini, University of California at Berkeley. Among the thousands of Jaina images found throughout India, those from Mathura produced during the Kushana period are unique, for they alone contain representations of unclothed Jaina ascetics holding a single small piece of cloth in such a way as to cover their nudity. These curious figures cannot be identified with monks of the present-day Jaina sects of the Digambaras, who practice total nudity, or of the Shvetambaras, who wear two long pieces of unstitched white cloth wrapped around their bodies and occasionally a white blanket over their left shoulders.
To exemplify briefly the fruitfulness of this latter methodology - it is difficult to read far in Jain literature without encountering the terms bhavya and abhavya, expressions designating respectively those innately capable of advancing along the path of spiritual release and those innately destined to make no progress at all in this respect. This dichotomy, which implies acceptance of something akin to predestination, is highly problematic for a religion which argues for the supposedly essential equality of souls and their common ability to transform their status through effort, although Jaini seems to have been the first to draw serious attention to this. Jaini's explanation in his paper "Bhavyatva and Abhavyatva: A Jaina Doctrine of "Predestination of the two categories by reference to the Buddhist Vasubandhu's Abhdharmakosabhasya and what can be reconstructed of the teachings of the Ajivika leader Makkhali Gosala is a masterly demonstration of the sectarian modifications of an old sramana doctrine of predestination. Many scholars in this time of enforced specialization would have been content to rest on their laurels purely on the basis of these Buddhological publications. Jain studies, however, had never been far from Jaini's thoughts even at the beginning of his career, Having begun productive rescarch on Jainism during the 1970s, most notably with his edition and translation of a unique Digambara philosophical stotra, the Laghutattvasphota of Amrtacandrasuri, for which he used photographs and a handwritten copy of the only manuscript given to him by Muni Punyavijaya, Jaini eventually came to realise thar Jain studies had to be given a higher profile within undergraduate teaching of Indian religions and, specifically, to be more fully integrated into the South Asian Studies program at Berkeley. Not finding any suitable textbook with which to effect this, he resolved to write one himself and so produced in 1979 the work for which he is probably best known, The Jaina Path of Purification. This book can be regarded, with only slight exaggeration, as having attained the authority of virtual primary source and its value in promoting and providing an entree to its subject in the English-speaking world in recent years is inestimable, to the extent that the late Kendall Folkert felt able to talk of pre-and post-Jaini cras in recent Jain studies. In his most recent book, Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women, Jaini translates and analyses a range of Shvetambara, Digambara and Yapaniya sources to provide a broad and yet detailed conspectus on what is, for South Asia, a unique debate on female religiosity, a subject growing in importance in Indian studies. The collected works of Prof. Jaini enables seasoned aficionados working exclusively in either Buddhism or Jainism with a sense of the mutual illumination these two traditions can cast upon each other, and, lastly reveal to a younger generation of scholars a corpus of writing at once inspiring, informative and provocative.
Seated Jaina Tirthankara, headless. Mathura,
red sandstone, 3rd century A.D.
These figures are referred by some scholars as Ardhaphdlakas (monks with partial covering) and some speculate that these figures might be those Yapaniya monks, another Jain sect that is now extinct. Certain texts would indicate that they were the forerunners of the current Shvetambara order following Mahavira's example where he kept a cloth during his initial period of renunciation. The style of research and investigation performed by Prof Jaini is fairly well demonstrated in this paper. Using literary evidences form various Digambara, Shvetambar, Buddhist, and other texts, Jaini has tried to trace the history and practices of Jain monks and tried to correlate the relationship between the
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