________________
84
PAUL DUNDAS
uncultivated ground when lacking the supporting exegetical material with which they could be interpreted.
The hagiographies of Abhayadeva Süri mirror the gradual development within medieval Jainism of a process by which commentary gradually came to be viewed as agama, as a necessary component part of authoritative scripture as a whole, rather than being merely a secondary, ancillary element. That Abhayadeva himself was aware of the indispensability of commentary can be gathered from his remarks, which echo and borrow from an earlier Jain exegete, Jinabhadra Ganin (sixth century CE), about the derivation of the word "sūtra." After giving the standard etymologies of the word from sutra, "thread" and sūc, "indicate" (i.e., "sütra is that by which meanings are threaded or indicated"), along with sukta, "well spoken," in the sense of being well-established, inclusive and well-enunciated, Abhayadeva claims that "sutra" can also be derived from supta, "asleep" on the grounds that scripture is effectively unawakened when without a commentary.?
DHARMASĀGARA ON THE NECESSITY OF SCRIPTURAL COMMENTARY
Some five hundred years later, towards the end of the sixteenth century, Dharmasagara, one of late medieval Jainism's most significant intellectuals, also referred to the analogy of the inefficacious somnolence of the sutra which is without accompanying exegesis and developed the point still further by arguing for what is effectively the equal status of scripture and commentary.76 By his own account, Dharmasagara had a taste (ruci) for establishing Jain orthodoxy and confounding sectarians and all his major writings evince a near obsessive preoccupation with matters of correct ritual practice and lineage, consistently promoting the interests of the Tapă Gaccha, the lineage to which he belonged." The Pravacanaparikṣā ("Examination of the Doctrine"; henceforth PP), composed in 1575, is the only work of Dharmasagara's to have been consulted in any way seriously by scholars, but it has generally been utilised as little more than a source of chronological and doxological information concerning Jain sectarianism. Yet it is unquestionably Dharmasagara who has most to tell us about the attitudes of a very significant strand of Jainism towards the question of scripture and exegesis, his view on the relationship between the two being most strikingly expressed in the claim that an individual reading a sutra without a commentary is, as it were, attempting to open a locked adamantine casket with his teeth.78
