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Studies in the Origins of Buddhism c22: Appendix 1. Early Jaina Sources

Studies in the Origins of Buddhism c22

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English

Appendix 1. Early Jaina Sources

c22.1

The Jaina Canon, its History and Authenticity.—Mahāvīra is traditionally supposed to have taught the fourteen Puvvas to the Gaṇadharas. These “original” texts are, however, according to the Digambaras, lost without a trace. According to the Śvetāmbaras, their remnants i.e. the first ten Puvvas, which Bhadrabāhu permitted Sthūlabhadra to reveal to others,¹ were, in the Council at Pāṭaliputra, combined to form the twelfth Aṅga, the Diṭṭhivāya. But in the centuries that followed the council this twelfth Aṅga also got lost. Some little information about its contents is apparently preserved in the Samavāyaṅga, the Nandī and the Cheḍasūtras. From these it appears that of the five divisions of the Diṭṭhivāya only the third dealt with the Puvvas proper. Obviously the Diṭṭhivāya was more than a mere summary of the Puvvas. In any case, we can hardly be certain that any authentic information about the fourteen Puvvas has survived in these references to the contents of the Diṭṭhivāya.²

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¹ Cf. Charpentier—Uttarādhy. pp. 14-15 who rejects this tradition.

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² Charpentier does not regard the recovery of the Dṛṣṭivāda as impossible!

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But the Digambaras go further: even in the Council of Pāṭaliputra they had refused to acknowledge the authenticity of the then compiled eleven Aṅgas. And the Śvetāmbaras tell us that even within this compilation disorder crept in and it had to be centrally re-edited in the Council at Valabhī; and our present Aṅgas represent the text as fixed in this second council which took place a little less than a thousand years after the death of Mahāvīra. All these texts should, therefore, be considered late, except such as can on internal grounds prove their earliness in whole or in part.³ That in spite of having sprawled over a millennium of literary activity the Jaina canon should still preserve many genuinely early fragments is in itself a marvellous tribute to the conservatism of the Jainas, which, however, must not be strained too far, as Jacobi, for instance, does when he observes that "Der Grund für die Conservirung der alten Lehre scheint mir der zu sein, dass ihre Ideen und Termini mit denen der späteren Philosophie incommensurabel waren, also von letzterer nicht beeinflußt werden konnten. Sie waren gewisser-massen versteinert und wurden in den Zustand von Generation zu Generation unverändert überliefert."⁴ The danger in holding such a view too rigidly is that we might consider as early many doctrines which really represent later developments.

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³ Charpentier concludes "I do not doubt that the principal sacred scriptures represent even in their present shape the actual canon fixed at the Council of Pāṭaliputra". (op. cit. p. 31). He seems to proceed throughout on the assumption that a text, if not proved to be late, should be considered early. In view of the history of the Jaina canon, this rule ought to be reversed.

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⁴ ZDMG. 38 p. 18.

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A brief consideration of the present Śvetāmbara-siddhānta reveals that only a few works can be regarded with some certainty as "ancient" i.e., going back, in substance at least, to the age of Mahāvīra.

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The Painṇas.—The Painṇas, as their title indicates, are miscellaneous pieces and their list is in reality "quite indefinite".⁵ Of the Cheya suttas, according to Winternitz, only the Kappa, with its supplement—the Vavhāra—and the Āyāradasāo can be considered "early".⁶

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⁵ Winternitz, II. p. 461.

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⁶ Ib. p. 462; 464-465.

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Kalpasūtra of Bhadrabāhu, which forms the eighth section of the Āyāradasāo, is, however, a composite work, and one of its most interesting sections—that dealing with Mahāvīra’s biography—cannot be regarded very early because of its style.⁷ Of the twelve Uvaṅgas only the first two perhaps contain some early material, the rest being “systematic” and exaggerated dogmatic, “scientific” and mythological treatises. Of the first two Uvaṅgas the Rāyapaseṇaijja, in particular, seems to be based on an old tradition, since the Pāyāsi sutta in the DN is either an adaptation of it or draws on the same source.

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⁷ Ib. pp. 462-463. The fact that it describes the “transfer of the embryo”, which is disbelieved by the Digambaras, shows that it cannot antedate the schism between the two schools by much.

c22.13

The Angas.—The Aṅgas have in their present shape a mosaic appearance, so that a unity of authorship or that of the age of composition can hardly be predicated of any one of them in its entirety. Some of them are almost wholly of a mythological and legendary content. Such are the Nāyādhammakahāo, the Aṃtagaḍadasāo, the Aṇuttarovavāyadasāo and the Vivāgasuyaṃ. Any absolute or relative chronological specifications about these are possible only on criteria and evidence drawn from literary and mythological history rather than from the history of philosophic religious thought which alone is of paramount interest in the present inquiry. It may be noticed, however, that of the Aṃtagaḍadasāo and the Aṇuttarovavāīya “the original contents were totally different from the present contents.”⁸ The tenth Aṅga also appears to be a “later work” which “took the place of the old Aṅga which had got lost.”⁹ Nor is it possible to regard the fourth Aṅga as early since it enumerates the eighteen varieties of the Brāhmī and the thirty-six chapters of the Uttarādhyayana,¹⁰ it even refers to the Nandī.¹¹ The fifth Aṅga too in its present shape cannot be much earlier since some parts of it assume a very developed and exhaustively "systematic" doctrine¹² and the text refers at many places to such works as the Pannavaṇā, the Jīvābhigama and the Nandī. It is possible, however, that many of its dialogues and narratives, which at places approach the Nikāyas in style belong to the very earliest parts of the canon.¹³ The third Aṅga resembles the Aṅguttara in form, but is much more schematized. The sprinkling of genuine-looking dialogues is slight and a precise and developed doctrine is assumed. At one place a list of official titles occurs which seems to indicate an administrative system which is, to say the least, post-Mauryan.¹⁴

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⁸ Winternitz, II. p. 450.

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⁹ Ib. p. 452. Cf. Charpentier, Uttarādhy Intr. pp. 26-27.

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¹⁰ Cf. Charpentier op. cit. p. 41.

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¹¹ Winternitz, II. p. 442.

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¹² This stage of complexity in idea and expression may be compared to that in the Abhidharma.

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¹³ Cf. Winternitz, II. p. 443-444.

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¹⁴ Sūtra 693.

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The Earliest Texts.—The works that are, then, left over as early are the Āyāraṃga, where the second book appears to consist of appendices and is late;¹⁵ the Sūyagaḍaṃga, where too the second book is comparatively late,¹⁶ parts of the Uvāsagadasāo, such as Chapter VII¹⁷ and the Uttarajjhayaṇa, where the first twenty-three chapters appear to contain, in general, an earlier stratum than the chapters which follow.¹⁸ Linguistic investigation points to a similar conclusion about these texts. According to Pischel "Der sprachlich für die Prosa weitaus wichtigste Text ist das erste Aṅga, das Āyāraṅgasutta, das unter allen die altertümlichste Sprache hat. Nach ihm kommt besonders das zweite Aṅga in Betracht, das Suyagaḍaṅgasutta, dessen erstes, vorwiegend metrisches Buch für die poetische Sprache ist, was das Āyār, für die Prosa . . . . . . . Uttarajjhayaṇasutta, das eine Fülle altertümlicher und eigenartiger Formen enthält . . . . . . ."¹⁹ Ideological simplicity is a further factor which unifies these texts. As Charpentier observes "The really old texts of the Jaina canon, e.g., the Ācārāṅga, the Sūtrakṛtāṅga, and our text*—seldom give real theological or philosophical explanations in the style of the later—mostly prose—parts of the canon."²⁰

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¹⁵ See Winternitz, II. p. 437.

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¹⁶ Winternitz, II. p. 438.

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¹⁷ Ib. p. 449.

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¹⁸ Charpentier—Uttarādhy. Intr., p. 39.

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¹⁹ Grammatik, p. 18.

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²⁰ Op. cit., p. 37; cf. also the opinion of P. L. Vaidya on the antiquity of the Āyāraṅga and the Ovavāiya. (Uvāsagadasāo, p. X).

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References in the Nikayas and their Value.—The Nikāyan references to the early Nigaṇṭhas serve the invaluable function of providing independent evidence about early Jaina belief and practice. Since the composition of the greater part of the Nikāyas was, in all probability, completed by the time of Aśoka, this evidence too should be, in general, supposed to yield a picture comparable to that given by the earliest stratum of texts in the extant Jinist canon.

c22.29

• The Texts.—Jacobi has already discussed²¹ the information supplied about the Nigaṇṭhas by the following Buddhist texts: Mahāvagga VI. 31; MN.—the Upāli Sutta; AN. III. 70; and DN.—the Sāmaññaphala Sutta.

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²¹ SBE. 45, pp. XV-XX. * Uttarādhyayana°.

c22.31

To these a few more references may be added: MN. —the Kandaraka Sutta which classes the Nigaṇṭhas among the Attantapa Puggalas; the Cūladukkhakkhandha—and the Deva-daha-suttas which present a summary and a critique of some leading Nigaṇṭha doctrines; AN. I, pp. 220-221 where the Licchavi Abhaya summarizes the Nigaṇṭha doctrine in much the same way as in MN. Sutta 14 above; AN. I, p. 206 which describes maliciously the “Nigaṇṭhūposatha”; AN. IV 179ff where Nātaputta dissuades Sīha from going to Buddha because the latter was an “Akiriyavāda”; AN. IV. 429 where Nātaputta is reported to have asserted: “aham antavantena ñāṇena antavantaṃ lokaṃ jānaṃ passaṃ viharāmīti”, but which appears to contain some confusion since it makes Pūraṇa Kassapa also advance the claim of omniscience which is elsewhere usually associated with the Nigaṇṭha leader alone; SN. I. 66 where a Devaputta utters a *gāthā* on behalf of the doctrine of Nātaputta; SN. I. 78 where the Nigaṇṭhas are apparently distinguished from the Jaṭilas, the Acelas and the Ekasāṭakas; SN. IV. 298 where Nātaputta rejects the possibility of “avitakko avicāro samādhī” as advocated by Gotama, and declares knowledge superior to faith; SN. IV. 317-18 where a Nigaṇṭha-sāvaka summarizes the teaching of Nātaputta to Buddha as “yo koci pāṇaṃ atimāpeti sabbo so apāyiko nerayiko......adinnaṃ ādiyati....kāmesu micchā carati......musā bhaṇati......yam bahulaṃ yam bahulaṃ viharati tena niyyātīti” which is then criticized.

c22.32

Beside these, there are at some other places references of an indirect character. In the Mahāsīhanāda-sutta (MN.), for example, the description of the fourfold Brahmacariya is in spirit closely reminiscent of Jaina practice. The *gāthā* that occurs in the context, “so tatto so sīno eko bhimsanke vane| Naggo na caggimāsīno esanāpasuto munīti||”²² might have been taken from a Jaina work. The Abhayarājakumāra sutta (MN.) and SN. IV. 323-25 show Nātaputta as attempting to confound Buddha by propounding clever dilemmas. The ten Nijjaravatthus in AN. V. 215 appear to be Buddhist contents poured into a borrowed framework. The definition of Niddaso Bhikkhu in AN. IV. 35 ff. “yo hi koci dvādasavassāni paripuṇṇam parisuddhaṃ brahmacariyaṃ carati”—which is criticised by Buddha, is reminiscent of the importance which the Jainas attached to twelve years of penance.

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²² MN. I. p. 79.

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