Agamas

The Svetambara canon is usually counted at forty-five texts, though the number varies by sub-sect. At its core are the eleven Angas, the limbs, held to preserve the teaching of Mahavira as compiled by his disciples. The Acharanga sets out the conduct of the ascetic and includes an early account of Mahavira's own austerities; the Sutrakritanga argues against rival doctrines; the Bhagavati is a long dialogue covering cosmology, karma and metaphysics; others give narrative and disciplinary material. Around them sit twelve Upangas or subsidiary limbs, six Cheda-sutras on monastic rule and its breaches, four Mula-sutras including the Uttaradhyayana and the Dashavaikalika that novices learn, ten Prakirnakas, miscellaneous, and two short texts on epistemology.

The list is eleven Angas, not twelve, and the missing one matters. The twelfth, the Drishtivada, is held to have contained the fourteen Purvas, the prior teachings, a body of doctrine transmitted from before Mahavira and understood to have covered the deepest material on karma and cosmology. All Jain traditions agree it is lost, and both traditions' accounts of scripture are shaped by that loss.

The language is Ardhamagadhi, a Prakrit, a vernacular Middle Indo-Aryan speech rather than Sanskrit, which Jain tradition holds to be the language of Mahavira's preaching. The choice is doctrinal as well as historical: teaching in the vernacular rather than in the Sanskrit of the brahmins was itself a position. Later Jain literature, including the philosophical works both traditions accept, moved into Sanskrit, and the Agamas acquired layers of Prakrit and Sanskrit commentary, niryuktis, bhashyas, churnis and tikas, without which the archaic text is hard going even for specialists.

The Jain account of transmission begins with loss. Tradition holds that a twelve-year famine in Magadha, some generations after Mahavira's death in the fifth or fourth century BCE, drove a large body of monks south under Bhadrabahu while others remained in the north under Sthulabhadra. When the two groups met again their memories of the teaching, and their practice, had diverged. A recitation assembly at Pataliputra is said to have attempted a recovery of the Angas; the Purvas were already slipping away.

Further councils followed, at Mathura and Valabhi, and the decisive one was the second assembly at Valabhi in Gujarat, presided over by Devarddhigani Kshamashramana. Tradition dates it 980 or 993 years after Mahavira's liberation, giving roughly 453 or 466 CE, and credits it with committing the surviving canon to writing and fixing the recension the Svetambara use. That is around a thousand years of oral transmission, and the Svetambara do not dispute the length of it; they hold the lineage of memorising ascetics reliable enough to have carried the substance.

The Digambara draw the opposite conclusion from the same history. On their account the erosion was total: the Angas as well as the Purvas were gone by roughly the second century CE, with Bhutabali remembered as the last ascetic to hold even partial knowledge of them. What Valabhi produced, on this reading, was a well-meant reconstruction by monks who no longer had the originals, and it therefore cannot be scripture. The disagreement is not a footnote about manuscripts. It runs alongside the sects' other divisions, whether a monk may wear clothing, whether a woman can attain liberation in her present birth, and it means the two largest Jain traditions do not share an authoritative text.

Denying the canon did not leave the Digambara without scripture. They treat as their oldest surviving authority the Shatkhandagama, the scripture in six parts, composed in Prakrit by Pushpadanta and Bhutabali and understood to preserve, at second hand, material from the lost Drishtivada on the workings of karma; and the Kasayapahuda, the treatise on the passions, ascribed to Gunadhara. Both come with monumental commentary: Virasena's Dhavala on the Shatkhandagama, continued by his pupil Jinasena and completed in the ninth century, and the Jayadhavala on the Kasayapahuda. Alongside these the Digambara give great weight to systematic treatises, Kundakunda's Prakrit works, and Umasvati's Sanskrit Tattvartha Sutra, which is the rare text both traditions accept.

Within the Svetambara there is further variation. The image-worshipping Murtipujaka accept the forty-five-text canon; the Sthanakvasi and Terapanthi, reformist groups that reject temple image worship, accept a shorter list of thirty-two, discarding texts they regard as later or as supporting practices they oppose. So the phrase "the Jain Agamas" names different collections depending on who is speaking.

In use, the Agamas function more as a monastic and liturgical resource than as a text laypeople read through. Ascetics study them under a teacher with the commentaries; passages such as the Uttaradhyayana's account of Mahavira's final teaching are recited at the annual Paryushana observance; the disciplinary texts govern the conduct of mendicants. Access has historically been restricted, with some texts held unsuitable for lay or unprepared readers, and the systematic critical editing of the Svetambara canon by Jain and Western scholars is a modern undertaking, still incomplete.