Jain Agamas

Composition and transmission

Jain tradition holds that Mahavira's teaching was gathered by his chief disciples, the ganadharas, into twelve Angas, and that further texts were composed by later teachers. Transmission was oral for centuries. The tradition records a council at Pataliputra under Sthulabhadra to recover what was fading, and a final redaction at a council at Valabhi in Gujarat, conventionally dated to the fifth century CE, at which the texts were fixed in writing.

The twelfth Anga, the Drstivada, containing the Purvas — the oldest stratum — was already lost by that point, and both orders agree it is gone. What survives in the Svetambara canon is some forty-five texts, in Ardhamagadhi Prakrit, comprising Angas, Upangas, and several further classes of disciplinary, expository and narrative works.

Contents

The canon is not systematic philosophy. The Acaranga sets out mendicant conduct and contains some of the oldest material, including passages on non-violence of considerable force. The Sutrakritanga argues against rival doctrines. The Bhagavati is a long dialogue covering an enormous range of questions. The Kalpa Sutra gives the lives of the tirthankaras. Others are cosmological, narrative or disciplinary.

Around the canon grew a commentarial literature — niryuktis, bhashyas, curnis and Sanskrit tikas — which is often where doctrine is worked out in detail, and which is in bulk far larger than the canon itself.

The Digambara position

The Digambara hold that the transmission failed entirely and that the Valabhi texts are a reconstruction rather than scripture. They accept instead the Satkhandagama and Kasayapahuda, held to preserve fragments of the lost Purvas through a separate line, together with the systematic works of Kundakunda and Umasvati.

The practical consequence is that the two orders read different books. Much Jain narrative literature, including most of the tirthankara biographies, exists in Svetambara recension only, and any general account of Jain scripture has to say which order's canon it means.