University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Aesthetics of Sovereignty: The Poetic and Material Worlds of Medieval Jainism Sarah Pierce Taylor University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Asian Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Religion Commons, and the South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Taylor, Sarah Pierce, "Aesthetics of Sovereignty: The Poetic and Material Worlds of Medieval Jainism" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2052. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2052 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2052 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Aesthetics of Sovereignty: The Poetic and Material Worlds of Medieval Jainism Abstract "Aesthetics of Sovereignty" explores how premodern religious communities employed narrative as a site to imagine ideal political worlds in ways that exceeded the capacity of formal philosophical and politico- theoretical discourse. Taking the Digambara Jain community of the ninth and tenth-century western Deccan as my primary focus, I argue that Jains theorized, modeled, and continually revised what it meant to be both a king and a Jain through literary and material improvisations with the narrative of the first Tīrthaṅkara Ādinātha (a genre known as the Ādipurāṇa). From the proposition that worldly sovereignty culminates in renunciation in Jinasēna’s Ādipurāṇa (c. 860 C.E.) and the devolution of courtly erotic love into devotional affect in Pampa’s Ādipurāṇaṃ (941 C.E.), to the vision of an ideal king as Jain devotee in the Cāvuṇḍarāya Purāṇaṃ (978 C.E.), my dissertation tracks shifting Jain experiments with language, genre, and artistic mediums that reflect broader attempts to imagine ideal worlds structured around perfected notions of worldly and spiritual sovereignty.