Padmanabh Jaini at Symposium 2013

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

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COLLECTED PAPERS ON JAINA STUDIES
significance of the term 'yapana' employed to describe the conduct of the apostate Jaina monks in Harişena's narrative. This word reminds one of the Pali form yapaniya (from yarape) meaning 'sufficient, i.e. just enough for supporting one's life', an adjective commonly applied to provisions (such as food, clothing, and shelter) for a Buddhist monk. The Jaina monks in Harişena's narrative could be designated as yapana or yapaniya because, faced by the calamity of a long period of drought, they followed an exceptional way of obtaining food "just sufficient for supporting their mendicant lives.
PLATE I
Whether the relaxation of the rules allowed during this period of crisis eventually became a permanent way of life for these ardhaphalaka monks or whether it led to the wearing of full clothes as is claimed by the Bhadrabahukathanaka cannot be an. swered by the evidence available. The arrival of such ardhaphalaka monks in Valabhi need not be disputed; but King Vapravada's intervention and the subsequent rise of the order of fully-clothed monks--the kambala-tirtha (leading the author of the Vaddaradhane to characterize these new monks as the Svetapaas) appears highly suspicious. It is significant that the narrator of the story applies the designation Yapana-samgha not to those who lived in Gujarat (Lata) but to those who migrated still further into the Deccan. The ardhaphalaka monks may indeed have appeared in the South with the half-a-piece of cloth as their mendicant emblem. Groups of such monks could have been identified initially as Yapana or Yapaniya, 'only just sufficient for supporting a mendicant way of life', possibly even as a derogatory term. Eventually the word was rendered into Kannada under different spellings and the original meaning was lost. Gradually as its members merged with the Digambaras in the South by adopting nudity or becoming advanced lay-disciples called the bhattārakas," and with the Svetambaras in the North by wearing full-length clothes, the old Yapana-sangha could have lost its independent identity.
Lucknow Mwm no J. 23. Seated Jana Tirthankara, headless Mathura, red sandstone, 3rd century A.D. (Courtesy of American Institute of Indian Studies, Varanasi.)
Nevertheless, certain later pieces of literature give some clue about the manner in which the origin of the Yapana-sangha was not altogether forgotten. Gunaratna, the fifteenth-century Svetambara commentator on Haribhadra's Saddarsanasamuccaya, counts the Yapaniyas as a sect of the Digambaras and yields a bit