The Yogasastra of Hemacandra

Description

When the author of the Yoga Sustra completed his scholastic summa of Svetambara Jainism and presented it to king Kumarapala, not only was his name inscribed in the royal chronicles of the caulukya dynasty, he also became a famous and respected scholar for those future generations, jainas and non-jainas, who came to regard his exposition as the arguably most systematic and clear work of its kind. Born in a town located sixty miles southwest of Ahmadabad during the latter part of the Ll.th century, Hemacandra 1 grew up in a region where the spread and development of religious ideas were not impeded by Islam, even though the region was still marked by the political destabilization which had resulted from Mahmud Ghazni’s invasions at the beginning of the century’s Under the reign of the Saivite king Kama and his wife Mayanalladevi, Hemacandra and his fellow jainas lived in relatively peaceful coexistence with various Saiva denominations, all profiting from royal patronage in compliance with ancient Indian royal ideology.

At the age of eight Hemacandra left his parental home in Dhandhuka for Stambhatirtha (modern Cambay) unaware that this journey would mark the starting-point of a career as an outstanding monk-scholar, which would earn him the honorific title Kalikalasarvajfia, “The Omniscient of the Degenerate Age”, among his co-religionists, as well as a place of honor in general Sanskrit .literature. At Stambhatirtha, the young Cangadeva was initiated into a mendicant order by his teacher Devacandra. Under the name of Somacandra he was now a jaina monk of the Vajrasakha of the Kotikagaccha, the famous Svetambara order known afterwards as the Tapagacchai Judging from his future literary production, Somacandra, during the following years, received an education the basic elements of which he shared with most of his Indian and, for that matter, European colleagues. Like the convent schools of medieval Europe and the various North Indian Buddhist and Brahmanical seats of learning, the basic elements of his jaina education consisted of grammar, dialectics and rhetoric. In addition, and as a further supplement to the purely confessional training, various arts and sciences of Jaina as well as Buddhist and Brahman cal provenance were studied. Nonetheless, the sole object of the education, mediated through a learned lingua franca, was ideally not to produce a man of extensive reading, however eloquent and deliberate, but a wise man (Pandita), a “Sanskrit’s”, whose insights were morally grounded, emanating from rational argumentation, personal experience and humble respect for the teacher and his teaching.