This alternative history begins with the Jain monk Jinasēna, the preeminent poet of Amōghavarṣa’s court. However, the biographical fragments we possess of Jinasēna’s life tell us very little about his specific relationship to and status within this court. As is so often the case with medieval texts, we learn very little about the author Jinasēna from his three works: the Jayadhavaḷā (837 C.E.), the Pārśvābhyudaya (c. 840 C.E.), and the
Ādipurāṇa (c. 860 C.E.).145 The thirty-six verses of Jinasēna's Jayadhavaḷā colophon
comprise the only available piece of his autobiographical writing and, even then, the scope of what we learn is quite circumscribed.146 He states that he began as a pupil of the monks Candrasēna and Āryanandi and, eventually, comes under the tutelage of
Vīrasēna.147 Together he and Vīrasēna complete the Jayadhavaḷā commentary on the
Kaṣāyaprābhṛta during the reign of Amōghavarṣa at a place called Vātagramapura.148 He
145 I diverge from M.G Kothari’s opinion that Jinasēna wrote the Ādipurāṇa first. It is
clear from Guṇabhadra’s take over of their joint Mahāpurāṇa project that Jinasēna died while writing the Ādipurāṇa, making it certain that the Pārśvābhyudaya was his first literary endeavor. M.G. Kothari, trans. Śrījinasenācaryaviracitam Pārśvābhyudayam (Mumbai: Kamstraksan House, 1965), Introduction 17.
146 M.D. Vasantaraj says that there are thirty-six verses in Jinasēna’s colophonto the
Jayadhavaḷā. Vasantaraj, Jaināgama Itihāsa Dīpike (Mysore: V.R. Prakashana, 1997), 279. I have found a number of secondary sources that cite directly from these verses. For example, seePushpa Gupta, Rasa in the Jaina Sanskrit Mahākāvyas (Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1993), 16-17, fns. 2 and5;Kothari, Śrījinasenācaryaviracitam
Pārśvābhyudayam, 22; K. B Pathak, “Bhartṛihari and Kumȃrila,” Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 18 (1890-1894), 226; and Nathurama Premi,
JainaSāhitya aura Itihāsa (Bombay: Hindi-Grantha-Ratnakara, [1956]), 129, fns. 4 and 5. However, I have been unable to locate these verses in any published editions of the text nor have I been given access to the manuscripts themselves. The current editor of the
Dhavaḷā and Jayadhavaḷā at Dhavaḷā Tīrtha Institute at Śravaṇa Beḷgoḷa told me that
while previous published editions selectively quote from the colophon verses in their introductions, they mistakenly did not print the complete text of the colophonat the end of the volumes. The citations in the secondary sources likely come from unpublished transcriptions such as the one that A.N. Upadhye copied from the Śolapur manuscript. Upadhye, “Brhat-Kathākośa,” Upādhye Papers (Mysore: Prasaranga, University of Mysore, 1983), 104 fn. 8. From various sources I have been able to reconstruct thirty out of the thirty-six verses that Vasantaraj mentions.
147JD, v. 19 and 26.
148 Ibid., v. 6. Jinasēna is often referred to in secondary literature as a brāhmaṇical convert
to Jainism, contradicting his own account of entering the monkhood as a child. Ralph Strohl summarizes this tension as "One tradition considers him to have been a Brahman convert, although another tradition considers him to have taken Jaina orders at a very young age." Ralph Strohl, “Making One’s Bed and Lying in it: Uses of Rasa and Bhāva in the Ādipurāṇa of Jinasena,” in Vasantagauravam Essays in Jainism: Felicitating Professor M.D. Vasantharaj of Mysore on the Occasion of his Seventy-fifth Birthday, ed. Jayandra Soni (Mumbai: Vakils, Feffer and Simons, 2001), 143; and George Ralph Strohl, “The Image of the Hero in Jainism: Ṛṣabha, Bharata, and Bāhubalī in the
then describes himself in the following manner:
Previously unpricked, his two ears were pierced with the quill of knowledge. Longing for the Lakṣmi of liberation, he possessed the quality of being a bhavya.149
He followed an unbroken vow of celibacy from childhood.
That muni did not posses a particularly beautiful body nor was he extremely clever. Even so, the Goddess Sarasvati,
the embodiment of heightened pleasure and the abode of no man, selected him herself with a garland during in a self-choice ceremony. His innate qualities were radiance, calmness, discipline,
and he was unaffected by qualities that effected other learned men. With regards to his body, he was very small,
but with regards to his ascetic qualities, he was not small at all. His body was emaciated, but he was not emaciated in terms of virtue. He did not overextend his sphere of influence nor did he think too swiftly. Therefore, he turned towards the distant shore of the lake of his own knowledge. He spent his time is perpetual worship of knowledge.
After that, those possessing correct sight considered him to have a body filled with wisdom.150
Ādipurāṇa of Jinasēna” (PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1984), 14. However, this seems to be a slight mischaracterization of the situation. There is no premodern source that I am aware of that names Jinasēna as a brahman. Instead, the basis for this attribution is largely based on the brāhmaṇically inflexed practices that he advocates in the
Ādipurāṇa that appear counter to the critiques of such practices found elsewhere in the Jain tradition. For a good summary of Jinasēna’s relationship to brāhmaṇical practice see “Jaina Integration of the Hindu Saṃskāras” in P.S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 291. For a more general account of the relationship between Digambara Jainism and Hindu saṃskāras see Paul Dundas, “A Digambara Jain Saṃskāra in the Early Seventeenth Century: Lay Funerary Ritual According to Somasenabhaṭṭāraka’s Traivarṇikācāra,” Indo-Iranian Journal 54 (2011): 99-147.
149Bhavya is a technical term that describes a soul with liberatory potential. It regularly
appears within Jinasēna’s Ādipurāṇa. I return to his usage of the term later in this chapter.
150
tasya śiṣyo abhavac chrimāñjinasenaḥ samiddhidhīḥ | aviddhāvapi yatkarṇau viddhau jñānaśalākayā || 27 yasminnāsannabhavyatvānmuktilakṣmīḥ samutsukā | svayaṃ varītukāmeva śrautī mālāmayūyujat || 28 yono anucaritaṃ bālyādbrahmavratamakhaṇḍitam | svayaṃvaravighānena citramūḍā sarasvatī || 29 yo nā atisundarākāro na cāticaturo muniḥ |
tathā apyananyaśaraṇā yaṃ sarasvatyupācarat || 30 śrī śamo vinayaśceti yasya naisargikā guṇāḥ | sūrīnārādhayanti sma, guṇair ārādhyate na kaḥ || 31
Jinasēna first establishes himself as a child monk, represented in the text through ear piercing, a ritual performed on young boys. In Jinasēna’s case, the instrument for piercing is the sharp quill of knowledge that symbolizes his entry into monastic training. His early entry into monasticism is emphasized here again through his practice of celibacy from childhood. Through this ascetic focus, Jinasēna writes against the grain of the conceits of court poetry: he is not beautiful or smart, his body is emaciated, and his temperament is perhaps best characterized by restraint (note Jinasēna’s poetics of modesty in contrast to Pampa’s self-aggrandizing style in the next section). Yet, all of these seemingly
disadvantageous qualities are turned into virtues that attest to his ascetic mastery and intellectual prowess. Even the standard trope of the bride’s self-choice ceremony is inverted; Saravati, the goddess of knowledge, chooses him in spite of his perceived intellectual and physical limitations. We can presume that it is through the grace of Sarasvati that Jinasēna’s body becomes a vessel of knowledge. Beyond this ascetic self- elaboration, Jinasēna provides no further information about his caste, family background, or natal place (note again the stark contrast to the lay Jain Pampa’s familial genealogy in the next section). This makes sense given that Jinasēna inhabits the renunciatory
subjectivity of a monk in which all ties to the world are abandoned other than those to the monastic community itself. Jinasēna appears here exclusively through the somewhat
yaḥ kṛśo api śarīreṇa na kṛśo abhūttapoguṇaiḥ | na kṛśatvaṃ hi śārīraṃ guṇaireva kṛśaḥ kṛśaḥ || 32 yo nā agrahītkapilikā nā apyacintayadañjasā |
tathā apyadhyātmavidyābdheḥ paraṃ pāramaśiśriyat || 33 jñanārādhanayā yasya gataḥ kālo nirantaram |
tato jñānamayaṃ piṇḍaṃ yamāhustattvadarśanaḥ || JD, 34 via M.G. Kothari, trans.
Śrījinasenācaryaviracitam Pārśvābhyudayam (Mumbai: Kamstraksan House, 1965), introduction, 22.
anonymous figure of the monk. He is equally evasive in the Pārśvābhyudaya, his first poetic composition that narrates the life of the twenty-third Tīrthaṅkara Pārśvanātha while incorporating the entirety of Kāḷidāsa’s Meghadūta. He ends the Pārśvābhyudaya simply with two lines in praise of Kāḷidāsa's Meghadūta, King Amōghavarṣa, a fellow monk named Vinayasēna, and his preceptor Vīrasēna.151
The Ādipurāṇa too provides no specific information about the circumstances of Jinasēna’s life. However, the opening of the text importantly situates the reader in Jinasēna’s literary and monastic world. In standard Jain textual fashion, Jinasēna begins the Ādipurāṇa in praise of the Jinas, the Arhats, the Gaṇadharas, and the sixty-three great men of the Jain tradition. He then metapoetically defines the genres of the purāṇa and
mahāpurāṇa and gestures to the excellent poets who wrote before him. He deems these poets crucial to his own literary endeavor. He says,
Although it was narrated by the Gaṇadharas, I will make an effort to compose this purāṇa.
Who can prevent an ordinary animal going on a route taken by lions? I travel on the narrative path trodden by ancient poets.
Even ordinary people go via the path invented by great people.152
These verses inhabit a poetics of modesty in which Jinasēna is made ordinary and earlier poets are made great. He goes on to name these poets and their poetic and intellectual virtues including Siddhasēna, Sāmantabhadra, Śrīdatta, Yaśōbhadra, Prabhācandra, Śivakōṭi, Jaṭasiṃhanandi/Jaṭācārya, Kāṇabhikṣu, Devācārya, Dēvanandi, Bhaṭṭākaḷaṅka,
151PA, vv. 4.69-70.
152
gaṇādhīśaiḥ praṇīte api purāṇe asminn ahaṃ yate | simhair āsevite mārge mṛgo anyaḥ kena vāryate || 1.30 purāṇakavibhiḥ kṣuṇṇe kathāmārge asti me gatiḥ |
Śrīpāla, Pātrakēsari, Vādisiṃha, and finally, his guru, Vīrasēna. What is notable about Jinasēna’s assemblage of poets—some still well known and others now forgotten—is that they are all monks. Indeed, up until the Kannada poet Pampa, all Deccani Jain Digambara literature was the product of a vibrant monastic community.153 Moreover, these monks like Jaṭasimhanandi who wrote the Varāṅgacarita, composed poetry and were often, but not always, affiliated with the courts of the Deccan. Indeed, in Jinasēna’s view, the writing of poetry in Sanskrit and Prakrit appears as a central activity for Jain monastics. Jinasēna positions himself within and indebted to this coterie of great monastic poets who came before him.
More broadly, participation in lineages—sectarian, monastic, literary or otherwise—were important ways in which medieval Jain monastic poets and authors sought to orient their texts and claim legitimacy for their work. Shared lines of religious and literary descent served to place oneself and one's text in a historical continuum stretching back to the twenty-fourth Tīrthaṅkara Mahāvīra—a historical figure who was a contemporary of the Buddha—and the learned community of ascetics that preserved his teachings. Jinasēna too became incorporated into such lineages. Writing in Kannada from the tenth to thirteenth centuries and beyond, Jain authors viewed Jinasēna's Ādipurāṇa as
153 The collapse of poetic and monastic identities can be confusing especially in reference
to figures such as Sāmantabhadra, a monk claimed by nearly every monastic lineage and who is far better known for his technical religious treatises such as the Ratnakaranda
Śravakācāra, a manual on lay Jain conduct, and the Gandhahastimahābhāṣya, a commentary on Umāsvāti’s Tattvārtasūtra. From the extant sources, we simply do not know Sāmantabhadra as a poet in Sanskrit or otherwise. B.L Rice cites an inscription that states that Sāmantabhadra wrote in “bhāṣa,” which he interprets to likely mean Kannada. B.L. Rice, “Early History of Kannada Literature,” JBBRAS 12 (1890): 250. Perhaps with access to Sāmantabhadra’s other writing, Jinasēna specifically says, “The fame of
Sāmantabhadra is the crown jewel on the heads of poets, bards, disputants, and orators.”
JĀP, v. 144. It seems that in Jinasēna’s eyes even Sāmantabhadra was a poet, not just a monk engaged in philosophical disputation.
a literary milestone not simply in Sanskrit literary history, but also in a broader Jain Deccani literary milieu that spanned Sanskrit and Kannada. The poet Pampa traces the tradition of writing the narrative of the first Tīrthaṅkara to Jinasēna in his Kannada rendering of the Ādipurāṇaṃ (941 C.E.); Cāvuṇḍarāya remembers Jinasēna as one who
wrote a mahāpurāṇa in his own Kannada version of the text called the
Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣapurāṇaṃ (978 C.E.); and Janna mentions Jinasēna's text as
inspiration in his Kannada Anantanāthapurāṇaṃ (1230 C.E.).154 The relationship between
Jinasēna and later Kannada court poets fleetingly gestured to here is most powerfully articulated by Hastimalla's Pūrvapurāṇam (late 13th C.E.).155 Hastimalla summarizes
Jinasēna's version of the Ādipurāṇa in Kannada and places a single Sanskrit verse drawn from Jinasēna at the head of each of his chapters. At the end of the text, Hastimalla describes himself as “imperial poet of both languages” (ubhayabhāṣakavicakravarti), a title through which he laid claim to both Sanskrit and Kannada.156 Such titles touting
one's poetic ability in both languages were not uncommon in this period: bilingualism was a skill worthy of praise. Rather than presenting vernacular literature as a radical
154PĀP, v. 1.35; CP, v. 1.8; Janna's Anātanāthapurāṇa, vv. 14-16 in S. P. Krsnakumar,
ed. Janna Sampuṭa, Kannada Jaina Sahitya Series 13 (Hampi: Prasaranga, Kannada Visvavidyalaya, 2007).
155 Warder notes that Hastimalla must have lived earlier than 1318 C.E. because
Ayyapārya's Jinendrakalyāṇābhyudaya bears a line in his praise. A.K. Warder, Indian
Kāvya Literature (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), 829.
156 S.P. Patil, ed. Hastimallaviracitaṃ Pūrvapurāṇaṃ (Dharward: Karnataka Univeristy
Press, 1982), final unnumbered verse, 53. Besides Kannada, we know that Hastimalla did, indeed, write in Sanskrit. He is the first extant Digambara Sanskri dramaturist. He seems particularly interested in the stories that derive from the Ādipurāṇa such as the romance between Ādinātha’s eldest son Bharata and his wife Subhadrā as told in Hastimalla’s Subhadrānāṭikā. See M.V. Patwardhan, The Añjanāpavanaṃjaya and
Subhadrānāṭikā of Hastimalla: Edited for the First Time with Variant Readings and an Exhaustive Introduction Dealing with Hastimalla’s Life and Writings (Bombay:
break from the Sanskritic tradition, Jain Kannada throughout the Deccan poets saw themselves as working within a literary tradition inaugurated with Jinasēna's Sanskrit
Ādipurāṇa.
In the Kannada, Prakrit, and Sanskrit literary-historical materials produced in the centuries after his death, Jinasēna was remembered less as a court poet and more as "an institution than an individual."157 In the guise of a poet-author, prominent monk,
community stabilizer, and lineage head, Jinasēna was mobilized to manage several orders of incoherence, instability and lack in the Jain community. In the centuries that preceded the Common Era, the Jain community as a whole lost the vast majority of their scriptural canon, a set of fourteen texts called the Pūrvas.158 This loss engendered a state of
scriptural crisis within the Digambara and the Śvētambara Jain sects. The Digambara tradition claimed to have orally retained a small portion of the Dṛṣṭivāda (a later textual distillation of the fourteen Pūrvas) related to karma theory. This scriptural fragment was committed to writing in the second century as the Ṣaṭkhaṇḍāgama (The Scripture in Six Parts) and the Kaṣāyaprābhṛta (The Chapter on the Passions; Prk. Kasāyapāhuḍaṃ).159
Together these two texts form the core of what is called the Digambara "secondary
157 A.N. Upadhye, “Jinasena and his Works,” in Mélanges D’Indianisme: à la Mémoire
de Louis Renou (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1968), 727.
158 The monk Bhadrabāhu, who is attributed to bringing Jainism to the Mysore region, as
described in the introduction to this dissertation, is the last person who both the
Digambara and Śvētāmbara's agree had knowledge of the entire scriptural corpus. P.S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 50.
159 The dating of these texts is difficult and speculative. I defer to P.S. Jaini, “Karma and
the Problem of Rebirth in Jainism,” in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions,
ed. Wendy Doniger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 217, fn. 1 and Kristi Wiley, “Aghātiyā Karmas: Agents of Embodiment in Jainism” (PhD Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), 16-17.
canon."160 Written in Jain Sauraseni gāthas, the Ṣaṭkhaṇḍāgama and the Kaṣāyaprābhṛta
are largely impenetrable without the extant Sanskrit-Prakrit hybrid commentaries produced in the ninth-century Deccan.161 The monk Vīrasēna, Jinasēna's preceptor,
composed the Dhavaḷā commentary on the Ṣaṭkhaṇḍāgama during the reign of