Some Jaina Canonical Sutras c17.2

c17.2

The *Vivāga-sūya*¹ (*Vipāka Sūtra*) is counted as the eleventh *aṅga* of the Śvetāmbara Jain *āgama*. Winternitz calls it the text of the ripening of actions. As its name implies, it deals with the consequences or resultants, painful or happy, of past deeds. It contains stories on the retribution of good and bad deeds after the manner of the Buddhist karma stories in the *Avadāna-Śataka* and *Karma-Śataka*. The *sūtra* illustrates the painful consequences by ten anecdotes and happy resultants by ten stories, each illustrative anecdote or story forming a distinct section of two parts into which the text is divided. The stories after narrating the careers of persons concerned as human beings proceed to describe the courses of their transmigration until their attainment of liberation in the end. In the first part dealing with the painful consequences, eight out of ten persons concerned are males and two females, while in the second part all the ten persons concerned happen to be males. The *sūtra* is judged as a *kathānuyoga* type, inasmuch as it develops its themes with the help of appropriate narratives that are presented mostly in their bare outlines. As Siddhasena in his commentary on the *Tatthvārtha* (I, 20) explains, the title of the *sūtra* means that the text indicates and sets forth the felt consequences of deeds: *Vipākaḥ karmāṇām anubhavastam sūtrayati darśayati tad Vipākasūtram*. Although the word *karmaphala*, meaning the fruits or results of deeds, may be taken broadly as a synonym of *karmavipāka*, in the Pāli *Nikāyas* a distinction is generally made between *phala* and *vipāka*, the first is taken to mean immediate results and the second after effects or results that follow as consequences. The word *vipāka* carries with it the notion of maturity. Accordingly the word *vipāka* implies the resultants that become ripe from the totality of deeds in a particular birth.