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Jain Studies in Honour of Jozef Deleu Edited by Rudy Smet and Kenji Watanabe HON-NO-TOMOSHA, Tokyo 1993
Jaina Exegetical Terminology Pk. vibhāsā 'Detailed Exposition'
Nalini Balbir
Study of Indian commentaries in their own right has recently emerged as a new and promising field of Indology which can throw light on methods of argumentation, ways of using and quoting traditional material, etc. Jainism also deserves to be included in this type of research. As is well-known, Jaina exegetical literature, especially in its earlier layers, is a bewildering body of texts endowed with a rather peculiar character. In the Prakrit verse-commentaries (niryuktis, bhāṣyas) and the Prakrit or Sanskrit prose-commentaries (cūrṇis, tīkās), the space occupied by the actual explanation of a given basic text (sutra) is rather limited. Their bulk consists in "scholastic elaborations, explanations, or extensions" so that they are in fact rather "pseudo-exegetical vis-à-vis the sutras." They form a well-interwoven and closed system having its own recurring analytic devices and schemes, to which belong for instance the nikṣepa and the caturbhanga, the lists of synonyms or the 'etymologies', as well as its own methodological vocabulary.2 Thus, to some extent they can be viewed as forming a specific branch of technical literature which would need special tools to handle it, such as lexica or indexes of the type we have, say, for Paninean grammar.3 A useful instance of what could be done is provided by W. Schubring's analysis of "150 Strophen Niryukti."4 His thorough investigation of the vocabulary found in the Daśavaikālikaniryukti also highlights the general processes of the niryukti-genre.
As a first step the word vibhāsā is selected here to initiate such a study, for it has the basic advantage of being well-documented in all strata of exegetical literature and being explained with the help of examples in two different sets of works, namely, the Avaśyaka-corpus and the Bṛhatkalpabhāṣya. Thus, besides the actual usage of the word we also come to know about the way it is conceived as a technical term.
