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The Tenth Wonder
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An important, if often insufficiently acknowledged, problem in Jainism is that the list of forty-five texts which has come to be accepted by Svetāmbaras (with the exception of the Sthānakvāsis) and by Western scholars as representing the definitive scriptural canon is, in fact, merely one of a number of possible lists and groupings. We do not possess the names of the texts redacted at the final council of Valabhi (fifth cent. A.D.) and, in the medieval period, there seems to have been a variety of rival textual groupings, as well as a tradition of lost scriptures 47. That this was a contentious and longstanding issue can be seen by the vigour with which the Kharatara scholar, Samayasundara, writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, attempted to defend the forty-five text grouping and to explain why there were so many discrepancies and disagreements in the scriptures 48. Such a situation has interesting implications, one of which may have been that there was, in certain monastic circles in the centuries after the council of Valabhī, a vagueness or uncertainty as to what constituted scriptural injunction, and that terms like āgama and vidhi may have come to signify for many monks not so much a body of texts and specific ordinances based on them as, more nebulously, the totality of current and traditional religious behaviour which was perceived as deriving from an amorphous source loosely defined as scripture. It is this vague view of scripture and its contents which has been repeatedly challenged throughout medieval and more recent Jain history by recourse to actual texts by figures such as the sūris of the Kharatara Gaccha, Lonkā, Banārsidās, Bhikhanji and Srimad Rājacandra, thus providing one of the most important dynamic elements in the history of the religion.
In concluding this brief account about where and how a Svetāmbara monk ought to live, it may perhaps be appropriate to recall the statement of the Digambara, Pūjyapāda (sixth cent. A.D.), to the effect that discussion of monastic dwelling in terms
47. For this whole question, see H. R. KAPADIA, The Canonical Literature of the Jainas, Surat, 1941.
48. Samācārisataka, Bombay, 1939, pp. 76-81.
