Story Of Rama In Jain Literature

Author(s): V M Kulkarni
Publisher: Saraswati Pustak Bhandar

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Celebrated scholars both of the West and the East such as Dr. Jacobi, Sri D.C. Sen and many others have dealt with the Ramayana in the spirit of critical scholarship. They have raised and answered a number of questions, e.g.. of its date, its recensions the historicity of Rama, the nature of the authorship-single or multiple the various forms that the story has taken where it has travelled (and it has travelled widely) Valmiki's indebtedness to others for the outline and the details, the foreign origin, the genuine and the spurious in the Rāmāyaṇa and so on. A comparative study of all the forms of the Rama story-the Hindu, the Buddhistic and the Jain and the forms available outside India is indeed too vast a subject for a thesis like this. To bring the subject-matter within moderate compass I have confined it to a critical and comparative study of the Jain forms of the Rima story available in Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhramia, and to an investigation of their interrelation and of the origin and development of the Jain forms of the story of Rima, which are definitely later in relation to the Ramayana and the great epic Mahabharata attributed to Vyasa.
Some scholars have dealt with the subject of the present thesis, but only with a few isolated aspects and that too partially. Rightly, therefore, Winternitz remarks in his History of Indian Literature, Vol. II, (p. 494, f.n. 3) "It is very desirable, however, that a careful comparison of all the Jinistic adaptations of the Räma legend be
made".
The method of study and approach to the problem: As the story of Rama occupies a very prominent place in the Mythology of the Jains, I have first set forth the nature of Jain Mythology and its salient features in comparison with the Hindu Mythology as a proper background for the study of the present problem. Then every one of the original Jain Raniyaas is studied thoroughly and critically in separate chapters. Attention is specially drawn in the footnotes to iaformation of cultural value offered in the work, such as references to customs, beliefs, etc. and to motifs of stories, striking subhāṣitas and stylistic merits of the work. As far as possible these notes are comparative and critical. The study of each work is prefaced with an the life-history, date and other works, if any, of the poet. As the Pauma Cariya is the earliest extant Jain poem dealing with the story of Rama, it is studied exhaustively.
Then I have studied the versions of Rāmāyaṇa based on the Paumacariya only in their deviations from it so as to avoid repetition. The Rama-story given by Gunabhadra is markedly different from that of Vimala. It is compared with Vimala's story and an attempt is made to trace the sources of its remarkable differences, The version of Ramayana given by Puspadanta is then treated as it is based on Gunabhadra's. The Rāmāyaṇa versions of Sanghadisa and Harise a are then dealt with fully as they show remarkable divergences with the works of Vimla and Gunabhadra. In the case of other Jain works that casually deal with the Rima story only a few general remarks are offered. In conclusion, I have dealt with the interrelation of the Jain forms of the Rāma story and traced the origin and development of Ramayana in Jain literature, discussing the mutual relation of the Jain tradition and the tradition represented by Valmiki.