Book Title: Jaina Monastic Jurisprudence
Author(s): Shantaram Balchandra Dev
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
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32
S. B. DEO ill, or had entered householdership again. But in order to have no occasion for favouritism by which there was a chance of unfit persons stepping into office, the rest of the monks were given supreme powers to ask the newly appointed successor to quit office if they thought that he was unfit for the post. If he relinquished the office, well and good; then he was not to undergo any punishment.... But, if in spite of the request of the rest of the monks, he persisted to hold on, then that person had to undergo cut in seniority or isolation. Thus it may be said that the working of the Church was based on purely democratic lines even in the modern sense of the term."
Similar rules guided the seniority and succession in the order of nuns. As in the case of monks, the nuns also had a right to ask the unfit nominee of a pravartini to withdraw from office (Vav. V, 13-14). The appointment to office after re-learning the texts, expulsion and debarring due to offences done while holding office and holding allegiance to the nun of senior standing by the disciples of one of less standing, -all these rules tally ad verbatim with those in force for the monks.
IV
The Units or Church Groups The various officers and juniors bound by these rules of academic and moral qualifications and the laws of seniority and succession, resolved themselves in different groups which conformed generally to the rules of monastic jurisprudence as a whole but were guided by their own rules of internal working.
These groups facilitated the supervision of the systematic working of monastic discipline as also the development of solidarity and the furtherance of the proper study of texts by a group.
To start with, these groups served the purpose very well. But later on with an enormous growth in the Gacchas, it seems to have resulted in differentiation of
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