Kalpa Sutra

Contents

The text has three parts: the lives of the tirthankaras, at length for Mahavira and Parshvanatha and briefly for the rest; a list of the succession of teachers after Mahavira; and the rules governing the conduct of mendicants during the rainy-season retreat, when travel is suspended because the ground teems with life.

The life of Mahavira is the fullest early narrative account, including the episode in which his embryo is transferred from a brahmin woman to a kshatriya woman, a story that carries a pointed social claim and that the Digambara do not accept.

Authorship and recitation

Tradition attributes the text to Bhadrabahu, placing it in the fourth or third century BCE, though the surviving form is later. Its liturgical role is fixed: it is read publicly over the eight days of Paryushana, the Svetambara festival of fasting and confession, with the account of Mahavira's birth read on the fifth day. This annual public recitation, rather than private study, is how most Jains encounter it.

Illustrated manuscripts

Because every congregation wanted a copy and wealthy lay patrons competed to commission the finest, the Kalpa Sutra became the vehicle for the Western Indian school of manuscript painting. Copies were produced in quantity from the twelfth century onward, first on palm leaf and then on paper, which allowed larger and more elaborate compositions.

The style is immediately recognisable: angular figures in strict profile with the further eye projecting beyond the face, flat fields of red and blue, and lavish use of gold and ultramarine in the most expensive commissions. These manuscripts are the largest surviving body of pre-Mughal Indian painting, and their conventions fed into later Rajput painting.