Umasvati

The problem of the man

Almost nothing about Umasvati is secure. His dates are placed anywhere from the second to the fifth century CE. Both orders claim him: the Svetambara call him Umasvati and hold that he wrote his own commentary on the Tattvartha Sutra; the Digambara call him Umasvami and attribute the authoritative commentary to Pujyapada instead. A colophon attached to the Svetambara commentary gives him a lineage and a place of composition at Kusumapura, but its authenticity is disputed.

The disagreement is itself informative. That a figure of this importance can be claimed by both orders suggests he worked before or across the hardening of the division, which is one reason his book could be received by both.

The achievement

The Tattvartha Sutra did something the canon had not: it stated Jain doctrine in Sanskrit, in aphoristic form, covering epistemology, ontology, cosmology, karma and liberation in a few hundred lines. This made Jain teaching arguable in the common philosophical language of the subcontinent at a period when Buddhist, Nyaya, Samkhya and Vedanta schools were formalising their own positions.

Its opening line — that right faith, right knowledge and right conduct together are the path to liberation — is the most frequently quoted sentence in Jain literature.

Influence

Every subsequent Jain systematic writer works in relation to this text. The major commentaries by Pujyapada, Akalanka and Vidyanandi are among the principal vehicles of Jain philosophy, and the tradition of commenting on it continued into the twentieth century. For a figure of whom no reliable biography exists, the textual footprint is exceptionally large.