Vividhatirthakalpah: Regards sur le lieu saint Jaina, vol. I: Traduction et commentaire; vol. II: Annexes.

• Author: CORT, JOHN E.
• Position: Review

Vividhatirthakalpah: Regards sur le lieu saint Jaina, vol. I: Traduction et commentaire; vol. II: Annexes. By CHRISTINE CHOJNACKI. Publications du Department d'Indologie, vol. 85. Pondichery: INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY and ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 1995. Pp. 522; 214.

Jinaprabhastiri (c. 1261- c. 1333 C.E.) was the head of the Laghu branch of the Kharatara Gaccha of the Svetambara Jams in the early fourteenth century, and one of the better-known exemplars of the cosmopolitan style exhibited by many medieval Jam monks. He was a courtier of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, and received firmans from the emperor for the protection of several important Jain pilgrimage shrines. His scholarly efforts were instrumental in establishing the Kharatara intellectual and ritual culture of the fourteenth century. His Prakrit Vidhimargaprapa is an important manual of Kharatara monastic discipline. He wrote Sanskrit commentaries on several popular Tantric and devotional hymns, on the Pratikramana Sutras, the principal mendicant liturgy, and on the Kalpa Sutra, a text central to Murtipujak self-identity. He is also credited with composing hundreds of hymns in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and even Persian. [1]

Both as a Jam monk and a member of the royal court he traveled widely in India. These travels are reflected in what is perhaps his best-known work, the Prakrit and Sanskrit Vividhatirthakalpa or "Guidebook to Various Shrines," most of which he wrote, but which also contains chapters by several other monks. This text is known to scholars primarily as an indispensable source on medieval Indian geography, but it also provides a lively entree into the world of medieval Jam religious experience. In sixty-three chapters Jinaprabha provides literary and proto-ethnographic studies of a number of important Svetambara pilgrimage shrines in northern, western, and Deccani India. In the two-volume book under review, a revision of her doctoral thesis, Christine Chojnacki has provided lucid translations and copious historical and philological notes to roughly eighty percent of this text. The first volume gives an introduction to the text, translations, and notes. She employs a typology of tirthas; sacred mountains, cities associated with the lives of the Jinas, other cities, miracle-stories about images, and accounts of Parsvanatha and several unliberated deities. The second volume fills out details of the Jam universal history mentioned in the text, and concludes with...