The Jain Agamas

The Agamas are the Jain scriptures: the discourses of Mahavira as they were compiled by his immediate disciples, transmitted orally for something close to a thousand years, and finally written down. The Svetambara Murtipujak tradition counts forty-five of them. Sthanakvasi and Terapanth Jains accept thirty-two. Digambara Jains hold that the entire original canon was lost and rely on a different body of authoritative text altogether.

That disagreement is not a detail. It is the deepest of the differences between the Jain traditions, because it concerns what may be cited as scripture at all.

How the canon came to be

Mahavira taught in Ardhamagadhi Prakrit, the vernacular of the region, and did not write. His teaching was organised by the ganadharas, the eleven principal disciples, into twelve Angas — limbs. The Angas were memorised and recited, and passed from teacher to pupil in that form.

Oral transmission of that scale is fragile, and Jain tradition is candid about the losses. A severe twelve-year famine, dated by tradition to the period of Chandragupta Maurya, scattered the ascetic community and broke lines of recitation. Three councils were convened over the following centuries to establish what remained: at Pataliputra under Sthulabhadra, at Mathura under Skandila, and finally at Valabhi in Gujarat under Devarddhigani Kshamashramana, conventionally dated to the middle of the fifth century CE — about 980 years after Mahavira's nirvana. Valabhi produced the written redaction that survives.

What did not survive is the twelfth Anga, the Drishtivada. It is said to have contained the fourteen Purvas, bodies of knowledge older than Mahavira himself, held to have been transmitted from the tradition of Parshvanatha. Knowledge of them declined generation by generation after Bhadrabahu, the last teacher credited with knowing all fourteen, and by Valabhi there was nothing left to write down. Every tradition agrees the Drishtivada is lost. What they disagree about is whether anything else survived.

The forty-five Agamas

The Svetambara Murtipujak canon is organised in six divisions.

The eleven Angas

Acharanga, Sutrakritanga, Sthananga, Samavayanga, Bhagavati (Vyakhyaprajnapti), Jnatadharmakatha, Upasakadasha, Antakriddasha, Anuttaraupapatikadasha, Prashnavyakarana and Vipakasutra.

Three of these do most of the work in ordinary citation. The Acharanga Sutra is the first and, on linguistic grounds, generally held to preserve the oldest layer of the canon; its opening book sets out ahimsa toward the six classes of living beings in language of considerable force, and it is the text from which most statements about Jain non-violence are drawn. The Bhagavati Sutra is the largest, a vast question-and-answer text between Mahavira and his disciple Gautama covering doctrine, cosmology and physics; it is the closest thing the canon has to a comprehensive reference. The Jnatadharmakatha is the narrative Anga, and it is where the story of Malli — the nineteenth Tirthankara, whom Svetambaras hold to have been a woman — is told.

The four Mulasutras

Uttaradhyayana, Dashavaikalika, Avashyaka and Pindaniryukti (some lists give Oghaniryukti). The Uttaradhyayana Sutra is traditionally held to record Mahavira's final discourse and is among the most read Jain texts of any kind. The Avashyaka Sutra sets out the six obligatory practices — the avashyakas from which pratikraman is built. The Dashavaikalika is what a newly ordained ascetic learns first, and is deliberately practical: how to walk, what to accept, what to say.

The six Chhedasutras

Nishitha, Mahanishitha, Vyavahara, Dashashrutaskandha, Brihatkalpa and Jitakalpa. The Kalpa Sutra read publicly during Paryushan forms part of the Dashashrutaskandha — which is why a text about monastic rules for the monsoon contains, in the same volume, the lives of the Tirthankaras and the succession of teachers. Its rules for the rains residence are the textual basis of chaturmas.

Why the counts differ

Svetambara Murtipujak Jains accept all forty-five.

Sthanakvasi and Terapanth Jains accept thirty-two: the eleven Angas, twelve Upangas, four Mulasutras, four Chhedasutras and the Avashyaka, setting aside the Painnas and the remaining Chhedasutras on the grounds that their authority is not established. The exclusions are not incidental — the texts set aside include much of the material used to justify image worship, which both traditions reject. See Svetambara Jainism for how the three branches diverge.

Digambara Jains hold that the transmission failed completely: that the famine and the centuries of oral tradition left nothing reliable, and that texts claiming to be the Angas cannot be what they claim. In place of a canon they hold the Shatkhandagama and the Kashayapahuda — second-century works on karma theory, held to descend from a surviving fragment of the Drishtivada — together with the writings of Kundakunda (the Samayasara, Niyamasara, Pravachanasara) and Umasvati.

Where to start

The canon is large, and reading it in order is not how anyone approaches it. Three practical starting points:

• Tattvartha Sutra, by Umasvati. Not an Agama, and that is exactly its value: it is the only text accepted as authoritative by every Jain tradition, Svetambara and Digambara alike. Roughly 350 aphorisms covering the whole of Jain doctrine — the shortest complete statement that exists.
• Acharanga Sutra, first book. The oldest layer, and the most direct on ahimsa.
• Uttaradhyayana Sutra. Thirty-six chapters, largely narrative and aphoristic, and the most readable of the canonical texts without a commentary.

Almost all of the Agamas exist in English translation, and the older translations by Hermann Jacobi are out of copyright and widely available — though they are Victorian, sometimes tendentious, and best read alongside a modern Jain edition. The commentaries matter more here than in most traditions: the Agamas are terse, and the niryuktis, bhashyas, churnis and Sanskrit tikas written over the following centuries are how they have actually been read.