Lessons of Ahimsa and Anekanta for Contemporary Life

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

Page 126

Sonya Quintanilla, "Exemplars of Anekanta and Ahimsa❞
in early Buddhist texts to refer to their Jain rivals, and literally means "those who are free from bonds." Several Jain and Buddhist texts, mostly of much later dates, refer to groups of Jain mendicants, who were in one way or another associated with a piece of cloth, by names such as ekasāṭaka, ardhakarpața, ardhaphālaka, yāpaniya, or gopya.2 In this paper I shall follow the precedent of the few scholars who have discussed these early Jain monks of Mathura and use the term "Ardhaphalaka" to refer to them, though it probably was not the name these monks used for themselves. "Ardhaphālaka" is a descriptive epithet which means "those with a partial piece of cloth."
No texts have been found that can be specifically associated with the Ardhaphālakas. Nor are there any texts that clearly identify them and explain their practices. Padmanabh S. Jaini has published a thorough study of passages in literature that might refer to the monks of this sect,3 but almost all of them were composed many centuries after their demise. "Given the variety of possibilities presented in various sources," concludes Jaini, “a conclusive identification of the sect of these ardhaphalaka images on the Mathura sculptures cannot be made from the available literary evidence.' Therefore, the art historical and epigraphical records are the most reliable documents for understanding the tenets and mores of the Ardhaphālaka monks of Mathura. Upon
4
Ibid., p. 492.
2
The term ekasāṭaka appears in the Thereavada Buddhist Samyuttanikāya. The term, Ardhakarpata, is used by Ramacandra Mumukṣu in the twelfth century in his Sanskrit version of the Badrabahucarita. The terms ardhaphalaka and yapana appear in the Bhadrabahukathanaka, a section of Harisena's Bṛhatkathakośa of the tenth century. And, the term, Gopya is found in a fifteenth-century commentary by Gunaratna on Haribhadra's Saddarśanasamuccaya. See Padmanabh S. Jaini, "Jaina Monks from Mathura: Literary Evidence for their Identification on Kuṣaṇa Sculptures," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (Vol. LVIII, Part 3, 1995), pp. 488, 479 (fn 2), 480, 487.
3 Ibid., pp. 479-494.
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