Mahavira and his Teaching

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

Page 8

JAINA EXEGETICAL LITERATURE AND THE HISTORY OF THE JAINA CANON
L. Alsdorf, Hamburg
Zeal and sagacity of the followers of Mahāvīra devoted to the study and teaching of their holy scriptures have given rise to a vast literature which apart from its immediate exegetical value embodies the fruits of Jaina scholastic scholarship of more than a millennium and thus contributes an important chapter to the history of Indian thought and learning. That it can be made to yield valuable information on the history of the Jaina Canon I hope to show in the present article.
This exegetical literature is as yet very imperfectly known. The needs of the modern Jaina community as well as of the Western pioneers of Jainology were served by the extensive Sanskrit prose commentaries forming a latest layer. The Prakrit predecessors of these Sanskrit Tīkās, the Cūrnis, had been almost forgotten. Some of them were printed in recent years, but, as Schubring in his “Doctrine of the Jainas" complains, with few exceptions did not come in the hands of Western scholars. Of the third class of commentaries, the voluminous Bhas yas in Prakrit verse, Schubring can only say that their importance for the history of thought and literature will be great when one day all of them will be accessible and subjected to scholarly study. As to the fourth and oldest class of texts, the Nijjuttis, the dwindling of interest in them even in old times is shown by the fact that they are included in the oldest Sanskrit Tīkās, e.g. in śāntisūri's Uttarajjhayana-tīkā, but left out in the younger ones, e.g. in the famous Uttarajjhayana commentary of Devendra. Their study was inaugurated in the West eighty years ago by Leumann, who, to quote once more Schubring, has never had a successor. The reasons for this unsatisfactory state of affairs will become clear when the true nature and mutual relation of the four kinds of exegetical scriptures are understood.
For the explanation of the holy texts, the Jaina acāryas soon developed a more or less fixed form of instruction. It was as little written down as the texts themselves, but its unimpaired
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