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6.4 Conclusion
6 ANALYSIS
knowledge, self-restraint and compassion lead to tranquility of mind.
Repetitions and variations have a specific religious function in our text. Although the motif of "Shrieking Souls" is common in Indian religious literature, we find traces of it in various ritual texts outside India, for example in Central Asia, Persia, and China. With his poems Vasunandin follows the genuine Indian tradition. This type of Jain instructive literature is called "religio-ethical verse" by Handiqui 1949:291. Alsdorf (1966:159) explains the way Jain authors might have treated the material they knew by heart: the learned monks made ad-hoc compositions by adding to the ancient patterns the minimum that would "create a self-sufficient poem intelligible without reference to a fuller prose tale". According to Handiqui these collections of stanzas are important because of the "place they occupy in Jaina literature and religious thought".
1962:304 points out that the threefold renunciation with regard to intention, preparation and performance of harmful acts relates to the code of conduct of the ascetics. Moreover, the parallel structure of stanzas of Śr (134ff.) and (191ff.) and the corresponding chapters of KA, Mul, and Mac, make it obvious that those verses are connected with the Aradhanaand Pratyakhyāna-traditions.
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