Jinamanjari 2000 09 No 22

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 40

cloth scrolls. Devotional paintings, also, would be carved in stone. Since they had never before been created in that medium, these plaques after paintings, for want of a better term, were called 'pața'. This theory does not seem out of keeping with later examples on cloth, which rightly retain the name. 20 I feel that the āyāgapața designs, particularly of the 'proto-samavasaraṇa' variety, come from a long tradition of painted pațas which also continued after the Kuşāņa period. Their perishable nature, however, meant that no examples other than those few in stone from Mathurā have come down to us until the medieval period.
The first literary reference to a samavasarana is in the Svetāmbara subsidiary canon, the Aupapātika Upanga of the Angabāhya, where it is said that Mahāvīra came to a samavasaraņa.27 The earliest written description of a samavasaraņa appears in the 8th century Adipurāņa of Jinasena, although it is so highly evolved that it presumably had developed over a number of centuries. While the Svetāmbara written descriptions are not found until the 12th and 13th centuries C.E., the core similarity to the Digambara variety would indicate a common heritage. This heritage, I believe, can be found in the Mathurā āyāgapaļas and their 'lost' cloth precursors, combined with stūpa symbolism.
The use of both the 'proto-samavasarana' type āyāgapata and the stūpa in Mathurā may indicate an ambivalence as to which symbol should be of highest importance. Later Jaina art proves that the samavasarana won favour, due in part, perhaps to the emphasis placed on the stūpa by rival Buddhists. 28 An arch fragment found in the Jaina section of Mathurā shows devotion paid to both a stūpa and to what appear to be āyāgapaļas. (fig. 3) It is not known, however, whether the arch itself comes from a gateway to a stūpa or to an architectural samavasaraņa.
Mānastambha
Svetāmbara texts express the necessity of overcoming pride before the message can be heard. The Digambaras, on the other hand, actually construct a mānastambha, or 'pride pillar', to remind one entering either a samavasaraņa or a temple that all pride must be relinquished. While the Digambara samavasarana