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SCRIPTURAL COMMENTARY IN SVETĀMBARA JAINISM
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Dharmasāgara's overall approach to the Jain sūtras is similar to that of fundamentalists everywhere towards sacred literature, in that he asserts the impossibility of their containing contradictions. The sūtras are based on meaning which is of unified form because the tîrthankaras who enunciated it were (and will be in the future) in a state in which all negative karma has been eliminated (kṣāyikabhāva). However, this meaning will inevitably manifest itself in various ways, because both those who transmit it, the disciples of the tīrthankaras, and those who hear it are in the nature of things of disparate attainments at particular times and situated in differing stages on the spiritual path. Those differences which do occur in the sūtras, such as the occasionally conflicting information offered about the tīrthankaras themselves, can therefore be ascribed to the varying karmic states (kṣāyopaśamika) of the redactors and those who succeeded them. As a necessary result, scriptural texts on their own should not be regarded as constituting and providing fixed, settled doctrine (siddhānta), but instead, and in accordance with the manifold ways in which sūtras manifest themselves externally, they should be conjoined with commentary in which all statements of the root-text are interpreted with as many connotations as possible according to the exegetical prescriptions of the hermeneutic manual, the Anuyogadvārāņi.79 Because there are also often key points of interest, relating to, for example, Mahāvīra's wife Yaśodā or the wording of the confessional formula to atone for the unwitting destruction of life-forms while walking (īryāpathiki), about which the sütras say nothing,80 Dharmasāgara therefore invokes a broad exegetical principle which holds that “a commentary is another text belonging to a text" (granthasya granthāntaram tīkā) and through which he can justify the status of commentary as continuing and amplifying a sütra by supplying information, otherwise not accessible within it.81
In the PP, Dharmasāgara gives a number of bovine analogies to convey how scripture lacks efficacy in terms of its own nature alone and must instead have its meaning extracted from it through skilful and qualified interpretation. Glossing a story about a cow, its calves and a milker, he explains how the milch-cow is the sūtra and the calves are the commentary (in this case, the niryukti variety). Just as the calves predispose the cow to give milk, so the niryukti makes the sütra disposed to yielding up its meaning. The man in the story who skilfully milks the cow is the commentator who is familiar with the canonically sanctioned modes of explanation and analysis (anuyoga).82 On the other hand, a person who undertakes to teach on the basis of scriptural texts without the necessary qualifications is, as it were, trying to milk an emaciated
