Manuscript Illustrations Of Uttaradhyayana Sutra

Author(s): W Norman Brown
Publisher: American Oriental Society

Page 16

INTRODUCTION late Professor Ernst Leumann, to be represented by an illustrated manuscript belonging to the library of the University of Strasbourg, and when I was in India in 1934-35 I found in Jain collections four other illustrated manuscripts of this same work. These last four I photographed, and their illustrations are the material on which this monograph is based. The illustrations of the Strasbourg manuscript were also to be photographed for me, through the courtesy of Dr. Boris Unbegaun, the librarian, but the outbreak of war at the end of August, 1939, made the photographing impossible. It is a fair assumption that the illustrations of the four manuscripts used include most, if not all, of the scenes likely to appear in any other manuscripts of the Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, and this study should serve as a guide in identifying their scenes, especially in the case of manuscripts using the Early Western Indian style of painting.
The Uttarādhyayana Sūtra (Uttarajjhayana Sutta) is well known as part of the Svetāmbara Jain canon, belonging to the section known as Mūlasūtra “root or basic sermons," a somewhat puzzling term taken by Charpentier to mean the very words of Mahāvīra himself, the founder of Jainism. It consists of 36 chapters, varying in length and most of them metrical, and its intention,” according to Jacobi, “is to instruct a young monk in his principal duties, to commend as ascetic life by precepts and examples, to warn him against the dangers in his spiritual career, and to give some theoretical information.” The age of the work is not earlier than around 300 B.C. nor later than 526 A.D., and it is a compilation, with the different parts being of unequal age. It is considered that the sermons were spoken by Mahāvīra in answer to unasked questions, as distinguished from the asked questions which are frequently the starting point of many discourses among both Buddhists and Jains. The most interesting chapters to us are likely to be those which recite legends, and some of these, as Charpentier points out, have Buddhist parallels.
The four manuscripts used for this study are of paper, not palm leaf, and come from the 15th and 16th centuries, that is, from the second of the two periods of the Early Western Indian style of miniature painting, which extended from about 1400 A.D. to 1600 A.D. The study is almost exclusively iconographic, and the validity of such a treatment lies in the fact that the scenes are largely clichés, being repeated with only minor variations in the different manuscripts, as is the case also with the illustrations of the Kalpasūtra and the Kālakācāryakathā. Again, with the Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, as with those other works, the subject of the illustration is not always explicitly indicated in the text, but is rather to be found in the commentaries. The commentaries accessible to me are the Sanskrit of Kamalasamyama published by Jayanta Vijaya (see below) and the Jaina Māhārāșțri Prāksta of
See BrKK, p. 14.
* This paper manuscript has a date equivalent to A.D. 1473. It contains 97 folios, with 36 illustrations, that is, one for each chapter of the text. Its library number is 4385. [This information is from Dr. Unbegaun.)
The longest treatments of this work are in the Introductory discussions in Charpentier and in Jacobi (see below for bibliographical indications of these works). See also in M. Winternitz, History of Indian Literature (2nd edition, English translation), vol. 2, pp. 466-470; W. Schubring, Die Lehre der Jainas (Grundriss der Indo-arischen Philologie, 3 band, 7 Heft, Berlin und Leipzig, 1935), p. 8o.
See BrKK, pp. 15, 20-24.