Lessons of Ahimsa and Anekanta for Contemporary Life

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

Page 134

Sonya Quintanilla, “Exemplars of Anekānta and Ahimsā”
on the plaque in Figures 5 and 6, only the Jain monk is nude and tonsured.
Even the colapatta itself may have been adopted from the practice of Brahmins who, in the pre-Kushan periods draped the skin of a black antelope over their left forearms, rather than over the left shoulder as was the practice during the Kushan period and later. In Figures 17 and 18 are relief carvings of Brahmins. The former depicts a scene from a Jātaka story in which the Buddha was a Brahmin in a previous life, and he wears the black antelope skin in the same way that the Ardhaphālakas wore the colapatta. The relief in Figure 18 is a detail from the story of the Brahmin ascetic boy Řśyaśộnga, who is similarly depicted with the antelope skin over his left forearm. This may have been a practice of revered Brahmin ascetics that was adopted by the Ardhaphālaka Jains, but adapted to cohere with the non-violent tenets of Jainism. Thus the black antelope skin was converted to a strip of cloth, though it still functioned as the emblem of an ascetic.
A distinctive aspect of the Ardhaphālaka Jains of Mathura is their focus on stūpa worship, but without any evidence of the stūpas' association with a relic.!4 Two examples of bas relief depictions of a stūpa under worship by Jains are on the stone plaque in Figure 5 and in the spandrel of the tympanum in Figure 19. It is possible that the Ardhaphālaka Jains adopted the centrality of stūpa worship from their Buddhist neighbors, though this is a point that bears further investigation. The monument of the stūpa could serve as a focal point of veneration for the Jain spiritual community, as it did for the Buddhists. Nowhere else in Jain art or at other Jain archaeological site does the stūpa play such a prominent role as it did in early Mathura. The donative inscription on the bas relief depiction of the stūpa in Figure 5
14 The archaeological remains of the prominent Jain stūpa at Kankāli-Tīlā in Mathura were published by Vincent Smith in The Jain Stupa and Other Antiquities at Mathura, Archaeological Survey of India, New Imperial Series, vol. XX, North-Western Provinces and Oudh, vol. V: Muttra Antiquities, 1900.
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