Jain Journal 1996 10

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

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JAIN JOURNAL : Vol-XXXI, No. 2 October 1996 As I survey the writings on Umāsvāti of this century, the following divergent trends with regard to this vexed issue are met with : 1. Several scholars regard the Sūtra and the Bhāsya as of Umāsvāti.
This is the view largely of the Nirgrantha-Svetāmbara scholars. Jagadishchandra Jain as well as of several Western scholars.
particularly the German Nirgranthologists. 2. At least one scholar felt that the encomium naming Umāsvāti at
the Bhāşya applies to the Sūtra alone (Ghatage 1935). But most Digambara scholars, and few Western scholars (Williams 1963; Zydenbos 1983) regard the Sūtra as of the Nirgrantha-Digambara sect and the Bhāşya alone is ascribed by them to a Śvētāmbara Umāsvāti, or, alternatively, for some the name of the Bhāşyakāra must be looked upon as unknown. And one scholar held that there were two Umāsvāti-s, the author of the Sūtra, an earlier Umāsvāti who was Digambara and the second later, a Svētāmbara Umāsvāti who altered the original text and composed the Bhāsya (Phoolchandra 1971).
3. In the opinion of still others, both the above-cited claims are
unjustified and the author of the Sūtra as well as of the Bhāsya, doubtless Umāsvāti, was a Yapaniya (Premi 1956 1956; Upadhye 1971). Alternatively according to some, the Sūtra was composed by a Yapaniya but the Bhāsya's author was a Svētāmbara (Bronkhorst 1985; Patoriya 1988).
I shall offer no comments on these views, -all as mutually conflicting as are diverse--for it is a subject of a separate paper or a series of papers for clearing the mess they have created. The conclusions I have reached as the result of my own researches is that Umāsvāti possibly was a pre-Śvētāmbara or non-Śvētāmbara, and hence non-abbatial Northern Nirgrantha holyman.31 Uccairnāgarasākhā, to which he belonged, was not a filiate of the Southern (Digambara) Church, nor of the Yapaniya Samgha. It was within the ambit of the early Northern Nirgrantha main stream tradition. The readings and content as well as some details of the version of the āgamas followed by the Uccairnāgara-sakhā, as met with particularly in the Bhāsya, apparently had differed at places from the āgamas of the Vajri-sākhā that are currently available with, and inherited by,
31. The Svētāmbara sect has been for the first time referred to in the literary
and epigraphical notices of the later part of the fifth century. At the beginning it apparently was a caityavāsi or abbatial sect and for long had so continued to remain a sect.