Tattvartha Sutra

The work

The Tattvartha Sutra sets out the whole of Jain teaching in some 350 aphorisms across ten chapters: the means of knowledge, the categories of soul and non-soul, the lower and middle worlds, the heavens, the influx of karma, its bondage, its stopping, its shedding, and liberation. It opens with the statement that right faith, right knowledge and right conduct together constitute the path.

Its importance lies in its economy and its comprehensiveness. Before it, Jain doctrine was distributed across a canon in Prakrit that was narrative and disciplinary as much as systematic. The Tattvartha Sutra put it into Sanskrit — the language of pan-Indian philosophical debate — in a form that could be commented on, taught and defended in that arena.

Shared authority

That both orders accept it is remarkable in a tradition otherwise divided over scripture. They do not accept identical texts: the recensions differ in wording at a number of points, most famously over whether a kevalin takes food, and the Digambara attribute an authoritative commentary to Pujyapada while the Svetambara hold that Umasvati wrote his own.

The disagreements are real but marginal against the agreement. The Tattvartha Sutra is consequently the standard entry point to Jain doctrine for scholars and for Jains of either order, and the commentarial literature on it — Pujyapada's Sarvarthasiddhi, Akalanka's Rajavartika, Vidyanandi's Slokavartika — carries much of the tradition's systematic philosophy.

Umasvati

Almost nothing is known of the author. His dates are argued across several centuries, from the second to the fifth CE, and each order claims him. The absence of secure biography has not diminished the work: it is often described as the single most important Jain text after the canon itself, and is the one book a reader wanting Jain doctrine rather than Jain narrative is usually sent to first.