Lessons of Ahimsa and Anekanta for Contemporary Life

Author(s): Tara Sethia
Publisher: California State Polytechnic University Pomona

Page 103

Lessons of Ahimsa and Anekanta for Contemporary Life
and lacks the ability to discriminate between good and bad positions on the grounds that he doubts whether in fact he is genuinely madhyastha. Such a person consequently goes along with every idea, statement and mode of practice and his supposed neutrality or “tolerance” is rather a lack of intellectual discrimination as a result of which he cannot distinguish between substance (tattva) and non-substance (atattva). As the Gurutattvapradipa puts it, professional connoisseurs of jewels would not adopt a position of neutrality when forming their conclusion (samānubandhaḥ) in the case of judging both glass and a genuine precious stone. Following such excoriation of any sort of mealymouthed tolerance, the author of the Gurutattvapradipa embarks upon a lengthy exposure of all non-Tapā Gaccha types of Jainism as being utsūtra, heretical and representations of false beliefs.
Few manuscripts of the Gurutattvapradipa have survived. Like some other controversial Svetāmbara Jain texts, it has had a slightly nebulous and marginal existence. Indeed, at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Gurutattvapradipa was publicly banned by the senior monastic leadership on the grounds that it was a source of factionalism. Its adoption by Dharmasāgaral4 led to sectarian debates as well as polarization within the Tapā Gaccha. Dharmasāgara's writings were extension of the Gurutattvapradipa's concerns. They represent a strongly and subtly argued supremacist perspective on Jainism and are fiercely exclusivist in their refusal to accept the validity of any religious path different from Dharmasāgara's own sect, the Tapā Gaccha. Furthermore, they remained a significant issue in the Svetāmbara community well into the second half of the seventeenth century. While I do not intend to pursue Dharmasāgara's arguments here, their existence should not be disguised by those who would wish to present Jainism in exclusively irenic terms and as promoting a
13 Gurutattavapradipa, op. cit., v. 11.
14 Dundas, The Jains, op.cit., pp. 163-64.
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