Mahaviras Word

Author(s): Walther Shubring
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 31

Mahāvira's Words by Walther Schubring
sometimes follows the topic. From both these explanations it naturally follows that these parts were added later, just as we then see a revising hand at work not only here.
We should not at all fail to see—and that is why the mention may be allowed here that the texts of the canon owe their form largely to a need for order. 36 This is valid, to mention first the larger relations, for the preparation of one whole out of scattered parts. Not always, though, does one have to look for a spiritual link among these: indeed, in the very nature of the work there is a certain colourfulness of the chapters which serves as an introduction for practice and for the world of ideas of Mahāvira's followers, just as the tradition mentions them for the Dasaveyāliya which Sejjambhava is supposed to have composed for his son Managa. The Dasaveyāliya and the Uttarajjhāyā take whatever is useful wherever they find it and the content of such a pattern selection is easily extended beyond the old limit. The dogmatic sections of the Uttarajjhāyā might have served at the very beginning, or quite early, for rounding up everything; 37 both chapters 11 and 12 of the Dasaveyāliya were added only later, because they contradict the title which determines the ten-number. If the connection between these two texts is based on the change (as regards the contents) then one has to try and infer it from other texts.
There are no less than four sections of appendices to the Bambhacerāim, the first half of the Āyāra, which are not only different from the previous ones, but partly also among themselves. This can be explained by the intention to present right conduct from now on practically, dealt with until that point mainly morally. Already in the Bambhacerāim this intention led to the inclusion even of the poetic description of Mahāvīra's own penance as the concluding chapter. Then, however, collections of rules, which incidentally are not the oldest of their kind, are added as the first and second appendices.38 The largest section of the third, the bhāvanā, makes up only the introduction to the five vows, including the instructions for their proper understanding (bhāvaņā), because Mahāvīra preaches both the vows and the rules for their execution on the strength of his omniscience, and the possession as well as the acquisition of knowledge of which omniscience is the most profound, permeates like a red thread the preceding biographical sketch (pp. 121f. and 130f. of the author's) edition). The last appendix,
so it is hardly necessary to say that this need for order goes back long before the time of Devarddhi. The gāhās serving as mnemonic verses and the editorial comments, perhaps also here and there the division into sections of the teaching and the mentioned references in the Viyāhapannatti are due to him. scr. Charpentier 1922, p. 38 and Schubring 1924, column 484. 38 See the Schubring 1921a, p. 9.