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What were the contents of the Drstivāda ?
Jaina tradition is unanimous as to the complete and irretrievable loss of the twelfth Anga, the Destivada, at an early date-yet it is able to furnish surprisingly exact and detailed particulars about its divisions, subdivisions, and contents. A good deal of these statements are obviously fictitious : nobody is likely to believe that e. g. the Nanappavāya-puvva consisted of 9999999, or the Saccappavaya-puvya of 10000006 (or 10000060) words 1 But even apart from such monstrosities, it is quite generally speaking the very exactness and detailedness of the statements concerning an avowedly long lost text that renders those statements suspicious; as A. Weber aptly put it as early as in 18832, “one can indeed give very rich details if one consults only one's imagination". Actually Western scholars have come to regard the tradition about the contents of the Drștivada as spurious in that sense that, though the (partly unintelligible) titles of some sections and sub-sections may be genuine, the lost Anga did not contain what is ascribed to it by the canonical table of contents and by the claims of a great number of most diverse texts and subjects to be derived from or based on the Destivada; in the words of Schubring 3: The 12th Anga, under the title of a discourse on (heterodox) views'...... was an instruction to apology and quite naturally fitted closely in the doctrine laid down in Angas 1-11. In the course of time it was lost. Jacobi (SBE 22, XLV) explains this fact by saying that later generations thought the discourses of their early predecessors not to be important any longer. It is more likely that their preservation appeared to be undesirable since the study of such disputes was apt to arouse heretical thoughts and activities."
The traditional claims to descent from the Dşstivada include those of the (post canonical) Svetāmbar Karmagranthas and of their Digambar counterparts, the famous "Siddhanta" texts of Mudbidri, the Şakthandāgama and the Kasayaprabhịta. When
1) No less fantastic, completely unreal figures are given in Samavayanga and Nand, for the
existing Angas 1-11. 2) Indische Studien vol. 16, p. 358. 3) The Doctrine of the Jainas, p. 75.
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