A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY DIGAMBAR JAIN MYSTIC and HIS FOLLOWERS* Taraj Taraj Svami and the Taraj Svami Panth
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
11 A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY DIGAMBAR JAIN MYSTIC AND HIS FOLLOWERS* Taraj Taraj Svami and the Taraj Svami Panth John E. Cort For many years, scholarship on the Jains paid too little attention to the historical, social and geographical contexts within which “Jainism” has always been embedded. At best one might find a general discussion of the philosophical differences between the broad groupings of Fvetambar and Digambar. These two “sects,” however, have never been unified social groups, and one looked in vain for substantial discussion of the actual sectarian divisions that defined Jain society.1 In recent years there has been a sea change in this situation, as detailed studies have been published on sectarian groups among the Fvetambars such as the Kharatara Gaccha, Tapa Gaccha, Añcala (Acala) Gaccha, Kadua Gaccha, Lokka Gaccha, Sthanakavasis, and Terapanthis. But to date there has been little attention to the sectarian divisions among the Digambars. There are two areas in which such studies are needed. One involves a clearer understanding of the cultural and ritual differences between the northern Digambar communities of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and northern Maharashtra on the one hand, and the southern Digambar communities of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and southern Maharashtra on the other.2 The other area involves a clearer understanding of the history, and differences of ideology, ritual, and social organization among the three older sectarian divisions in northern and central India, the Bis Panth, Tera Panth, and Taraj Svami Panth, as well as the twentieth and twenty-first century followers of Kanji Svami and Frimad Rajcandra.3 In this chapter I essay a beginning at addressing a part of the second lacuna, with an outline of some of the features of the Taraj Svami Panth (also called the Taraj Panth and Taraj Samaj) of Bundelkhand in central India. The Taraj Svami Panth and its founder Taraj Svami are among the least-studied aspects of Jainism. Padmanabh S. Jaini (1979: 310, n. 59) had to relegate them to a brief footnote in The Jaina Path of Purification, and Paul Dundas had to leave them out altogether in the first edition of his otherwise inclusive The Jains. 263 JOHN E. CORT The situation in Indian-language surveys of the Jains is hardly better. Little is found aside from brief references to Taraj Svami’s living in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the eschewing of image-worship by his followers, and the inclusion among his immediate followers of both Muslims and people from low castes. In December of 1999 I undertook fieldwork among the Taraj Svami Panth in Madhya Pradesh as part of a larger on-going research project on Jain attitudes, practices, and discourses concerning images. This fieldwork has been comple- mented by subsequent textual research on some of the fourteen texts attributed to Taraj Svami and also twentieth century literature by members of the Panth.4 In this essay I present an introductory survey of (1) what is known of Taraj Svami himself, as well as five different frames for understanding him found in the community; (2) the fourteen texts attributed to him; (3) the community of his followers; (4) the ritual culture of the contemporary Taraj Svami Panth; and (5) the most famous person born in the Panth, Rajneesh. Sources for the life of Taraj Svami For information on Taraj Svami we are indebted to the Digambar Tera Panth scholar Pajdit Phulcandra Siddhanta Fastri (1985b), whose 1933 study has not been surpassed as a judicious and scholarly biography. Phulcandra (ibid.: 96) argued that his full name, as used in the texts attributed to him, was Jin Taraj Taraj, meaning “Jina Deliverer Deliverance.” Phulcandra speculated that this name, indicative of an understanding of the man as both liberated himself and capable of aiding others in their liberation, was given by later redactors of the texts. The Thikanesara texts (see below) refer to him simply as Svamiji, “Reverend Master.” He has always been more commonly referred to as Taraj Svami. We have no record of his birth name. Only one of the compositions attributed to Taraj Svami contains any information about his life. The Chadmastha Vaji records that his death was on a Saturday, the seventh day of the dark half of the month of Jetha (May–June) in the year Vikram 1572, which corresponds to May 5, 1515 CE.5 Other information comes from two texts. One is a set of overlapping manuscripts known as Thikanesara (“The essence of what is authentic”) found in various Taraj Panth collections in central India. Phulcandra had access to three of these, copied in the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries. The other is a short text known as the Nirvaja Hujdi (“The promissory note of liberation”). Neither of these has yet been published, although I was informed that there are plans to do so. From these texts Phulcandra calculated that Taraj Svami was born on Thursday, the seventh day of the bright half of the month of Agahan (November–December) in the year Vikram 1505, which corre- sponds to December 2, 1448.6 We learn that his mother’s name was Virasiri or Vira Fri, and his father’s Garha Saha.7 He was born into the Parvar caste, in the Vasalla gotra (clan) and Gaha mur (lineage). Further, we learn that he was born in a village called Puspavati. Most authors, as well as the community itself, have taken this to be the contemporary village Bilhari near Katni in Jabalpur district. 264 A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY DIGAMBAR JAIN MYSTIC The only other textual information comes from another passage in the Chadmastha Vaji, which Phulcandra (1985b: 401) rightly termed abstruse (gurh), and for the meaning of which Nathuram Premi (1912–1913: 294) wrote that we depend on what the Taraj Panth infers it to mean. The standard interpretation of the passage is that Taraj Svami began his studies at age eleven, and continued for ten years. He then spent nine years in various spiritual exercises before taking the lay vows (vrata) and becoming a celibate (brahmacari) at age thirty. At age sixty he became a monk (muni), and then he died six-and-a-half years later.8 Phulcandra (1985b: 399–401) then extrapolated from this thin foundation, using scholarly sources on the history of the medieval central Indian Digambar community and the oral tradition of the Taraj Panth to reconstruct a biography for Taraj Svami. Phulcandra speculated that when Taraj Svami was five years old, his father took him to Taraj’s mother’s brother’s village of Garaula (also spelled Garhaula). There he was given to Bhattarak Devendrakirti, who occupied the Canderi seat, and was caste guru of the Parvar caste.9 Devendrakirti was favorably impressed by certain bodily signs of the boy. Taraj Svami began his studies under Devendrakirti. His fellow student was Frutakirti, author of a HarivaÅfa Puraja in 1495 CE.10 Taraj Svami left his studies at the age of twenty- one, and went to Semarkheri, near Siroñj in Vidisha (Vidifa) district, where his mother’s brother lived. He spent nine years in the area, often meditating in the caves in the nearby hills. At the age of thirty, having overcome the three spiritual obstacles of spiritual ignorance (mithyatva), illusion (maya), and seeking worldly gain through spiritual practices (nidana),11 he took the vows (vrata) of a celibate (brahmacari) and thereby became a formal renouncer. The Digambar practice of becoming a renouncer through the formal taking of the vow of celibacy has been little remarked in scholarship on the Jains. While such a person is still technically a layperson, since Digambars hold that only the naked muni is a true monk, the brahmacari, like the more advanced ksullaka and ailaka, is functionally removed from the lay estate, and follows the practice of observing the rainy-season retreat (caturmasa). Full-fledged munis were rare if not nonexist- ent for many centuries, especially in the Digambar communities of central India, and so these non-monastic renouncers played an important role in maintaining the ideals of renunciation. Phulcandra (1992: 216–234) has listed forty-nine brahmacaris from the Parvar caste in central India in the twentieth century. The importance of the brahmacari institution is clearly seen in an article by Johrapurkar (1964b), in which he discussed the sixteenth-century Sakghastaka of Brahma Jñanasagara. In contrast to the usual depiction of the Jain community (sakgha) as being fourfold (monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen), Jñanasagara describes the Jain community as being sixfold: fravaka (laymen), fravika (laywomen), pajdita (lay male intellectuals and ritualists, also known as pajde), vrati (male celibates), aryika (female celibates), and bhattaraka (male pontiffs). The absence of naked monks (muni) from this list is striking; they have been replaced by lay celibates.12 Taraj Svami remained a brahmacari for thirty years, and continued his spiritual and ascetic practices. At the age of sixty he went to the next stage by 265 JOHN E. CORT becoming a full-fledged muni. Unlike the Fvetambar tradition, in which it is essential to be initiated into monkhood by another monk, the custom in the medieval Digambar tradition was for a spiritually-inclined man toward the end of his life on his own to renounce all clothing and undertake monastic practice. Taraj Svami remained a monk for the final six-and-a-half years of his life. Phulcandra was not the only author to sketch a biography of Taraj Svami. The first extensive notice of Taraj Svami and the Taraj Panth was in a multi-part arti- cle published by the Digambar scholar Nathuram Premi in 1912 and 1913 in Jain Hitaisi, an important Hindi journal published from Bombay.13 Premi based his study on what he learned from his acquaintances in the Taraj Panth, and his study of the very few texts and publications available to him.