Laghutattvasphota

Author(s): Amrutchandracharya, Padmanabh S Jaini, Dalsukh Malvania, Nagin J Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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human saints who had attained omniscience (kevalajñāna) and then preached the Law for the salvation of suffering humanity. The Jaina poets saw the Jina as a Perfected Yogin endowed with omniscience and bliss, totally free from all bonds of attachment and aversion (vita-rāga). They saw him preaching his sermon in the holy assembly called samavasaraņa, surrounded by the ascetic disciples who had chosen to follow his path, and devoutly attended by laymen and lay-women singing his glory. This glory consisted not in the royal insignia, i.e., the white umbrella raised high over him, nor in the presence of gods like Indra who descended from heaven to kneel before him; rather, it lay in his teachings.' These were characterized by the doctrines of anekānta, ahimsă and aparigraha, and thus to be distinguished from all other teachings. The stotras thus became songs not so much of the Jina but rather of the Dharma, the most glorious of all things, and came finally to be manuals of the Jaina darsana'.
Almost every major writer of the post-canonical period has a stotra to his name. Prominent among these are Siddhasena Divākara (5th century A.D.) and 'Svāmi' Samantabhadra (6th century A.D.), authors of the Dvātrimsikālo and the Svayambhū-stotrall respectively. These works appear to have served as models for the Laghutattvasphoța. The Dvātrimśikā is not really a single work devoted to a single topic, but rather a collection of 32 independent hymns in diverse meters each containing 32 verses. The Laghutattvasphota has this same sort of uniformity: it is a collection of twenty-five independent chapters each having twenty-five verses in different meters. Each Dvātrimśikā hymn is either a 'stuti' of the Jina or a critique of a specific 'ekānta'; in this respect the work compares well with the Laghutattvasphota, which also aims at exposing the heretic systems, albeit in a less organized manner. But even a casual look at these two works shows a wide gap between them, both in style and the thrust of the subject matter. Siddhasena uses a classical Sanskrit style, closer to such contemporary poets as Kālidāsa; he demonstrates his erudition in Jaina siddhānta as well as in Vedic and Upanişadic literature and in the sciences of logic, disputation, etc. Amộtacandra, on the other hand, displays a predilection for the alliterative Campū style of the late medieval pericd, and is content with expounding the niscaya-naya in the framework of syādvāda. In this respect his work shows greater affinity with Samantabhadra who also threads his subtle arguments in defense of the syādvāda through some of the most eloquent portions of his Svayambhū-stotra, a collection of twenty-four short hymns addressed to each of the twenty-four Tirthankaras. Both texts open with the word svayambhū, and the Laghutattvasphoța has a few lines which correspond to passages in the Svayambhū-stotra. 1 2 It is true that Amstacandra does not dedicate his chapters to the Tirthařkaras but the first twenty-four verses of his initial chapter invoke the twenty-four individually, thus giving the Laghutattvasphoța the character of a stotra.