'Examining Religion' through Generations of Jain Audiences: The Circulation of the Dharmaparīkṣā

Indian literary traditions, both religious and non-religious, have dealt with literature in a fluid way, repeating and reusing narrative motifs, stories and characters over and over again. In recognition of this, the current paper will focus on one particular textual tradition within Jainism of works titled Dharmaparīkṣā and will trace its circulation. This didactic narrative, designed to convince a Jain audience of the correctness of Jainism over other traditions, was first composed in the tenth century in Apabhraṃśa and is best known in its eleventh-century Sanskrit version by the Digambara author Amitagati. Tracing it from a tenth-century context into modernity, across both classical and vernacular languages, will demonstrate the popularity of this narrative genre within Jain circles. The paper will focus on the materiality of manuscripts, looking at language and form, place of preservation, affiliation of the authors and/or scribe, and patronage. Next to highlighting a previously underestimated category of texts, such a historical overview of a particular literary circulation will prove illuminating on broader levels: it will show networks of transmission within the Jain community, illustrate different types of mediation of one literary tradition, and overall, enrich our knowledge of Jain literary culture

Two Buddhists, two jackals and a flying stupa : examination of the Buddhists in the Jain Dharmaparīkṣā

Jain narratives, with their instructive tendency, often point out the rights and wrongs by referring critically to other traditions. The satirical narrative Dharmaparīkṣā, by the Digambara monk Amitagati, written at the beginning of the 11th century, does this explicitly as it criticises Jainism’s opponents through narrative. Although this work emphasises the faults and flaws of the Purāṇic tradition, some space is also reserved for Buddhists. They appear as characters in one of the sub-stories of the Dharmaparīkṣā and are explicitly attacked at the end of the text. This paper will discuss in detail what is said about Buddhists in the Dharmaparīkṣā and why it is so important to mention them in a text that was composed when Buddhism was already declining in India. I will show that, by opposing Buddhists, Amitagati puts them within the philosophically relevant world for the Digambara Jain community, and that his characterisation of them reveals more about his own community than about Buddhists themselves