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PREFACE
The following essay is devoted to a historical treatment of the Jaina speculations pertaining to the field of ontology. And what has been achieved does not deserve to be called anything more than an outline. For the topic as such is truly stupendous. Certainly the Jainas have a very old tradition of treating philosophical problems, preserved in a large number of texts - more or less important and more or less early - composed in Prakrit or Sanskrit. And the additional stumbling block in this connection is the unfortunate fact that the texts called Agamas which the present-day Svetāmbaras regard as most authoritative are dismissed as spurious by the present-day Digambaras. The truth seems to lie somewhere in between these two versions of the case. For these texts contain some of the oldest pieces of doctrinal discussions undertaken by the Jaina theoreticians and yet they are more or less replete with more or less late interpolations. Under such circumstances the task of a scientific research work is to separate out the material that is genuinely old from that which is not so. And here lies the rub. For barring insignificant exceptions the Āgamic texts as they now stand are composed in a language that is almost uniformly the same and this means that it is next to impossible to determine on the basis of linguistic peculiarities, the antiquity or otherwise of this or that from among them (and hence of the doctrines formu)ated therein). So, what remains to be done is to study the antiquity or otherwise of the concerned doctrines themselves and thence of the texts formulating these doctrines). In the present study it is this method that has been chiefly employed while tracing the historical evolution of the Jaina notions related to ontology. But this method has its own difficulties and possible pitfalls. For one thing, one applying this method must have an adequate acquaintance with the content of the standard form of the doctrine whose historical evolution one is out to delineate; then one must be in a position to convincingly argue out why a particular version of this doctrine ought to be earlier (or later) than another. I am keenly aware of my deficiencies on both these counts, particularly the first which is basic. As a matter of fact, it is precisely this why I have been able to achieve so little inspite of my best efforts. This much about the Āgamic texts. The difficulty remains essentially the same also in the case of non-Agamic texts - particularly the earlier ones; for here too the relevant chronology is a matter of heavy dispute. My own participation in this dispute has been rather implicit inasmuch as I have simply sought to ascertain as to what position the texts in question occupy vis-a-vis doctrinal evolution. In some cases this has meant taking sides in controversy as to chronological question, in some
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