Crown-jewel of the Jain Canon:The Kalpa Sūtra in Mūrtipūjaka Jain Scholastic and Spiritual Life

Abstract

My dissertation project traces the textual tradition of the Kalpa Sūtra, a scripture sacred to the Jain religious community in India. For well over a millennium this work—more than any other single sacred document in the tradition—has been ritually reproduced, worshipped, and studied by both monastics and members of the devotional public. Given its rich and enduring religious value to the community, I look at the Kalpa Sūtra as a case to study intersecting issues relating to textual, material, and ritual culture that developed from the ancient to early modern period. Within this socio-religious context, my research focuses on the salvic sponsorship and worship of this scripture by the largest community of Śvetāmbara” (“white-robed”) Jains known as the Mūrtipūjakas (or “image-worshippers”), especially those who identify as members of the Kharatara Gaccha and Tapā Gaccha communities. In this milieu of the Mūrtipūjaka tradition, then, I reconstruct the long history of the Kalpa Sūtra’s production and reception and accordingly analyze the impact it had on their social, scholastic, and religious life. I document the religious professionals who were instrumental in the development of the Kalpa Sūtra as well as the regimes of ecclesiastical power which made its production possible. Such an archeology, historiography, and ethnography of the Kalpa Sūtra textual tradition entails giving careful attention to its various modes of material being (sacred scripture, illustrated manuscript, performed text) as well as connected codes of discursive meaning (scriptural, literary, pedagogical, popular). In short, by analyzing the patronage, production, and performance of this scripture across the centuries, I show how the Kalpa Sūtra was carefully crafted by its redactors as a charter document central to the self-fashioning of Mūrtipūjaka Jain community.