History, Scripture and Controversy in a Medieval Jain Sect.

• Author: Cort, John E.

History, Scripture and Controversy in a Medieval Jain Sect. By PAUL DUNDAS, Routledge Advances in Jaina Studies. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2007. Pp. xiv + 274. $120.

In a paper delivered at the 1978 meeting of the AOS, the late Kendall W. Folkert presciently argued, "the development of the Jain tradition, even including some dimensions of the Svetambara-Digambara division, is best understood by seeing the tradition as a collection of subdivisions, gacchas and the equivalent" (Scripture and Tradition: Collected Essays on the Jains [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993 164). While much of Jain scholarship in vernacular languages in India has taken this level of religiosocial organization as a given, Folkert noted that up until then accounts of the Jains in European languages had paid scant attention to these organizational units. As a result, his presentation in 1978 was highly tentative, if brilliantly predictive. An important aspect of the dramatic growth of Jain studies in Europe and North America in the past two decades has been its increasing focus on "Jainism" at precisely this social level, for it is at the level of the gacchas and their equivalents that Jainism is lived and experienced. To understand Jainism as a social and historical phenomenon (or, perhaps we should say, Jainisms as social and historical phenomena), one must understand the Svetambara Murtipujaka gaccha, and its equivalent units in the other broad divisions of Jain community, as primary units of analysis. While the gaccha is predominantly a mendicant institution, its role in shaping lay organization is significant. Scholars who have heretofore ignored or downplayed the centrality of the gaccha for the past millennium of Jain history will no longer be able to do so after the publication of Dundas's watershed book, in which he provides a detailed analysis of key themes in the history of what has been arguably the most important Murtipujaka gaccha over the past five centuries, the Tupa Gaccha.

Dundas does not attempt a comprehensive history of the Tapa Gaccha. Such an undertaking would take many volumes, as evidenced by the three volumes and two thousand pages of the most important Gujarati confessional history of the lineage, its precedents, and its rivals, Jain Puramparano ltihas, by the remarkable trio of scholar-monks Munis Darsanvijay, jnanvijay, and Nyayvijay, better known collectively as Triputi Maharaj (Ahmedabad: Caritra Smarak Granthmala, 1952-64). Much still remains to be done on the early and still obscure history of the lineage, before its rise to prominence in the Murtipujaka culture and society of western India in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even more remains to be done on its fissiparous history in the pre-colonial and early colonial period, before it was reconstituted (and one might say reimagined) starting in the late nineteenth century. Given the paucity of good scholarship in any language on the history of the Tapa Gaccha, Dundas has had to provide the reader with extensive data, much more so than a similar study in better-trod areas of religious history would require. He writes (p. 15), "studies of Jainism such as this must of necessity be primarily preoccupied with the task of conveying essential information rather than engaging in the luxury of interpretive theorising of well-established basic...