Mahavira and his Teaching

Author(s): C C Shah, Rishabhdas Ranka, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Bhagwan Mahavir 2500th Nirvan Mahotsava Samiti

Page 11

L. ALSDORF bhāva, the mental, spiritual, religious one. The list is later on optionally supplemented by inserting between dravya and bhāva the viewpoints of kala, time, and kşetra, space, and any other which the individual case may suggest to an ingenious teacher. Now the word to be investigated is of course taken from or suggested by the canonical text, but the investigation, or if the word-monster may be permitted, the nikṣepization is carried through without particular regard to that text which is almost at once completely lost sight of; instead, the niksepa gives any moderately clever ācārya the possibility to deal with any subject or chapter of the doctrine he wants to include in his teaching. The first and compulsory object of nikşepization is the title of the canonical text, if this is a compound, each of its members; next, the titles of each chapter and subsection; only in comparatively rare cases a prominent word or concept of the text itself. It will by now be clear that the vast majority of the nikṣepas contribute practically nothing to the explanation of the Sūtra text but treat of introductory or downright extraneous matter. And this is hardly less true of most other Nijjutti gāthās, whether they give versified tables of contents or catchwords for tales and distāntas to be inserted or lists of synonyms or, as so-called dvara-gathas, lists of items to be dealt with. It is thus quite correct to say that a Nijjutti is not a commentary in our sense of that term, that it affords little help for the understanding of the text; but there is no reason to complain: the explanation of the Sūtra text was not neglected, but by its nature it did not lend itself to condensation into Nijjutti verse. We do have it in the Sutra comments of Curnis and Tīkās, and the way in which these works alternate between explanations of Nijjutti stanzas and Satra text is after all a reflection of the original oral instruction, of which only certain parts had been epitomized in the form of mnemonic verse. The great importance of the Nijjuttis consists in their being the earliest non-canonical sources of Jaina doctrine and scholastic theology.
The average Nijjutti numbers a few hundred gāthās, and even to this size it has only grown by gradual insertions, part of which, as we have seen. are called bhās vas. Thes bhās ya, however, also designates a fourth class of exegetic works, each of which consists of several thousand Prakrit gathās. It was natural to assume, as did Leumann and Schubring, that the bhās ya was nothing but the result of the continued insertion of bhāş ya verses into the Nijjutti. To quote Şchubring (Doctrine of