Jaina Sūtras II: Uttarādhyayana and Sūtrakṛtāṅga

What it is about

The second part of the Jaina texts translated by Hermann Jacobi for the 'Sacred Books of the East': the Uttaradhyayana and the Sutrakritanga.

Context and history

Jainism is one of the oldest living religious traditions of India, contemporary with Buddhism and independent of it. The Uttaradhyayana is a collection of teachings in verse, traditionally held to be Mahavira's last words, and includes narratives and dialogues; the Sutrakritanga is more doctrinal and given over in large part to setting out and refuting the rival doctrines of the age, which makes it a historical source of the first rank for what was being thought in India in the fifth century BC. The two central notions are ahimsa — radical non-violence, extended to every living being — and anekantavada, the thesis that reality has many aspects and that no one-sided assertion captures it whole. Part one is in the corpus separately.

Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.