Padmanabh Jaini at Symposium 2013

Author(s): Padmanabh S Jaini
Publisher: Padmanabh S Jaini

Page 10

Chapter 17 Jaina Monks from Mathurā: Literary Evidence for Their Identification on Kusāna
Sculptures*
Among the thousands of Jaina images found throughout India, those from Mathura produced during the Kuşāņa period are unique, for they alone contain representations of unclothed Jaina ascetics holding a single small piece of cloth in such a way as to cover their nudity. These curious figures cannot be identified with monks of the present-day Jaina sects of the Digambaras, who practise total nudity, or of the Svetämbaras, who wear two long pieces of unstitched white cloth wrapped around their bodies and occasionally a white blanket over their left shoulders. The veteran art-historian, the late Dr. U. P. Shah, in Aspects of Jain art and architecture briefly mentions these figures, noting that nowhere in the above references from Svetāmbara as well as Digambara texts do we come across a reference to those figures on the simhāsana of a Jina which we find in a number of sculptures of the Kuşāņa period from the Kańkáli Tīlā.' Subsequently, in JainaRūpa-Mandana, he calls these figures ardhaphālakas (monks with partial covering) and speculates that these figures might be Yapaniya monks, another Jaina sect that is now extinct, and states that these figures need further investigation. In addition to Shah, N.
*This article was published originally in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. LVII, part 3, pp. 479-494, University of London, 1995. Reprinted with kind permission of Oxford University Press.