Jaina World of Non Living

Author(s): N L Jain
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith

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The Jaina world of Non-living
scores. The variable textual or tabletal lineages create an impression of their being hearsays and not of very reliable character catalysing for their critical examination to serve as reliable evidence.
This has been the period when most of the aphorismic texts of other systems had already been composed. This fact must have encouraged the scholarly Jaina seers like Umāsvāti to compose a Jaina Text on similar lines. Secondly, this has been also the period when the ethical and philosophical concepts of the Jainas were under experimental and mental scrutinisation stage. There were differing and Syaried alternative opinions and most of the concepts were in Ecolloidal state requiring logical crystallisation. The scholars point out that every thought and concept passes through a historical process of its development. Besides, this was also a period when the Nirgrantha (knotless) church (this was the earlier name of Jaina Church) was undivided though schismic nucleation might have taken place much earlier. The author Umāsvāti must be given credit to have been born during such a critical period of Jaina Church to crystallise and systematise the Jaina pathways and establish scholarly excellence in tune with the times of the middle of the third century A.D. The Aphorist Author
The spiritualist Jainas of pre- and early post-Christian era were mostly anonymous about their compositions. They adopted this tradition on many counts such as (i) extreme faith in the Jinas and their omniscience (ii) virtually tri-timal validity of their sermons of Jaina faith and (iii) compiler or faithful follower concept about their compositions for their credibility. That is why, there have always been discussions about their authorship and composition period. This has been a general trend even upto tenth century. Of course, some authors have a short mention of their parentage and/or teacher-taught lineage without any details. This historical disregard has been responsible to contribute to many debatable and as yet unresolved issues to evaluate Jinistic contribution in the literary and philosophical fields properly. The Tattvārtha Sūtra is no exception to this trend, specially its Dversion. Moreover, the prominence of the above trend in the early compositions casts doubt about the period of Vācaka Umāsvāti. One has to convince how could his details be taken as exception in the matter?
Despite this, many scholars have academically attempted about the issue of the authorship of this first Jaina Sansk rta tex
text. It that Acārya Umāsvāti is the author of the text ( of course, with different titles of identification). However, his personal identity is still under
agreed
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