Lessons of Ahimsa and Anekanta for Contemporary Life

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

Page 137

Lessons of Ahimsă and Anekānta for Contemporary Life
divinity. In the topmost register of the same tympanum Ardhaphālaka monks venerate a stūpa with their female disciples, while lay men honor the image of a seated Tirthankara in the middle register. The inclusion of foreigners, women, stūpas, yakşas, yakṣīs and anthropomorphic images into Ardhaphālaka Jainism as seen on this one tympanum bespeaks the adherence of these unique early Jains of Mathura to the ideals of anekanta."
The Ardhaphalaka Jains also adopted the Mathuran propensity for iconic image worship. The earliest identifiable depictions of Tirthānkaras in human form, the seated figures of Rsabha (Figure 3), are from Mathura, datable to around the second century B.C.E. They apparently were based on the prototype of the Brahmanical ascetic (tapasvin), with feet crossed, seated on a platform. 8 The form was adapted to suit Jain ideals, for the images of Rşabha are in the posture of meditation, instead of active instruction, and no antelope skin covers their pedestals,
17 In the pre-Kushan Jain tympanum from Mathura of the first century C.E. there are no examples of figures in Scythian dress. There are, however, a significant number of figures wearing an Iranian type of headgear, consisting in horizontally wrapped turbans secured to one's head by means of a broad strap worn under the chin (Figures 7 and 19). J. C. Harle and Domenico Faccenna have demonstrated that this type of headgear is generally worn by grooms, horsemen, warriors or hunters. (J. C. Harle, “The significance of wrapped heads in Indian sculpture," South Asian Archaeology 1979, ed. H. Härtel, Berlin, 1981, pp. 401-11; D. Faccenna, "The turban in the figural frieze from the Main Stupa of the Buddhist Sacred Area of Saidu Sharif I (Swat, Pakistan) and the Corpus opf Gandhāra sculpture," Silk Road Art and Archaeology, vol. 6, 1999/2000, pp. 45-9, esp. figs. 2, 7, and 8.) Whether those who wear them are necessarily foreigners in Mathura is uncertain. This sort of headdress is found in regions were particularly in close contact with the West, namely, Bhaja in Western India, Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Prades, and Gandhara and Swat. In any event, this kind of headgear is foreign to Mathura and is not regularly seen in art from India-proper. It appears to be an Iranian type of hat that was worn frequently either by Iranians in India employed as groomsmen or local people who adopted the Iranian item of dress. Be they foreigners or low-class groomsmen, hunters, or soldiers, men with this type of headgear were embraced by the Ardhaphālakas, which serves as further evidence for their attitudes of anekanta.
! For an example of a seated Brahmanical tapasvin dating to the mid- to late second century B.C. see A. K. Coomaraswamy, La Sculpture de Bharhut, Paris, 1956, pl. XLIV, fig. 172.
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