The Kalpa Sutra

For eight days each year, one text is read aloud in Svetambara Jain temples across the world, in sequence, from beginning to end. That text is the Kalpa Sutra, and its public recitation is the spine that the whole of Paryushan is built around.

What it is

The Kalpa Sutra is a Svetambara canonical text, traditionally attributed to Acharya Bhadrabahu, the last of the shruta-kevalis — those held to have known the complete scriptural tradition — and placed roughly in the fourth to third century BCE. It is formally a section of the Dasha-shruta-skandha, one of the Chedasutras, the group of texts governing monastic discipline.

The tradition of reading it publicly is later than the text itself. It is traced to a recitation at Anandapura before King Dhruvasena, said to have been given to console the king after the death of his son, from which the practice of public reading during Paryushan is dated.

What is in it

The Kalpa Sutra has three parts, quite different from each other.

1. The Jina-charitra — lives of the Tirthankaras

The largest and most familiar section. It gives a detailed life of Mahavira — his conception, the transfer of the embryo, the fourteen dreams, his birth, renunciation, twelve and a half years of austerity, attainment of kevala jnana, and his nirvana at Pavapuri. It then treats Parshvanatha, Neminatha and Rishabhanatha more briefly, and lists the remaining Tirthankaras.

2. The Sthaviravali — the succession of teachers

A lineage of the acharyas who carried the teaching after Mahavira, with their schools and branches. Dry to hear read aloud, and historically the most valuable part of the text: it is a principal source for the early organisational history of the Jain community.

3. The Samachari — rules of the monsoon retreat

The rules governing ascetics during chaturmas — where they may stay, how they must conduct themselves, what they may accept. This is the section that gives the text its name and its original purpose, and it is why a manual of monastic discipline is read to a lay congregation: Paryushan falls inside the retreat it regulates.

The eight days of reading

The recitation is distributed across the parva, with the fifth day carrying the passage everyone comes for.

The fourteen dreams

On the night she conceived, Trishala — Mahavira's mother — is described as seeing fourteen auspicious dreams, each read as a sign of the greatness of the child to come. Svetambara tradition counts fourteen; Digambara tradition counts sixteen.

1. A white elephant
2. A white bull
3. A lion
4. The goddess Lakshmi, anointed by elephants
5. A garland of fragrant flowers
6. The full moon
7. The rising sun
8. A great banner
9. A vase of gold
10. A lake of lotuses
11. An ocean of milk
12. A celestial vehicle
13. A heap of jewels
14. A smokeless fire

The fifth-day reading of this passage is the most theatrical moment in the Jain calendar. Silver or crystal replicas of the fourteen dreams are carried through the hall in procession; the birth is announced with celebration; and the right to perform particular honours — rocking the cradle, carrying a dream — is auctioned, with the proceeds going to the temple or to charitable funds. Families attend who attend nothing else all year.

The transfer of the embryo

The fourth day contains the text's most distinctive episode: Mahavira is described as first conceived in the womb of Devananda, a brahmin woman, and then transferred by divine agency to Trishala, of the kshatriya line, because a Tirthankara is not born into a mendicant family.

The episode is Svetambara only. Digambara tradition rejects it entirely, and it remains one of the substantive points of difference between the two traditions — along with the questions of whether an omniscient being takes food and whether a woman can attain liberation.

Reading it yourself

The Kalpa Sutra is available in Ardhamagadhi Prakrit with Sanskrit commentary, and in translation in Gujarati, Hindi and English — Hermann Jacobi's 1884 English translation, in Sacred Books of the East, remains the most widely cited.

Illustrated Kalpa Sutra manuscripts are also among the most significant bodies of Indian painting: the western Indian style of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, on palm leaf and then paper, with gold leaf and the distinctive projecting far eye, survives in large numbers because commissioning a manuscript for donation to a temple library was an act of merit.

Hearing it read during the parva is a different thing from reading it, and the tradition treats the recitation, not the text, as the observance.