The Jain community has a special festival for worshipping their texts every year- named Shruta Panchami which is solely devoted to the worship of sacred texts. Manuscripts are taken out, their covers changed and new books are donated to the temple libraries or offered to the munisanghas. This festival is a manifestation of the larger reverence for texts and knowledge that the community held historically due to which, the book or the text was not an ordinary material object. It was considered to be the container of the sacred word and therefore a great deal of emphasis was put on its sacredness. No wonder that the practice of ‘Svadhyaya’ (studying the texts) has been even called foremost of all penances in Jain texts.
Historically, this reverence to knowledge was best materialized in the construction of large libraries called jnān bhāndāgāras or simply jnān bhandāras. The idea of safeguarding manuscripts was given a realistic expression in the form of these libraries which stored vast number of carefully written and copied texts. As Paul Daundus rightly puts it, the construction of such libraries in itself was a landmark contribution of the Jains because they were the first to do so in ancient India. The most prominent example of such jnān bhāndāgāras is the story of construction of twenty one libraries in Patan by the twelfth century ruler Kumārapāla which were destroyed by the Turkish invasions. The level at which the work of manuscript preservation happened in medieval Jainism can be understood by the voluminous nature of the libraries which survive today. The example of Patan collections largely preserved in the Hemchandra Jnān Bhandāra shows the intensive book writing performed by the Jain laity in the distant past.
The contribution of this long and extensive tradition of documenting and preserving manuscripts in Jainism towards India’s intellectual heritage is in itself a lengthy topic to talk about. Therefore, the focus here will be on two aspects of the contribution of Jain Manuscript tradition- preservation the manuscripts of non-Jain schools of thought and to write commentaries on these texts.
The Jains rendered historical service to Indian heritage by preserving the texts belonging to other faith and philosophical systems. Vast number of texts belonging to the Brahminical and Buddhist schools were preserved in the Jain bhandāras with due diligence, and some of them were able to survive because of their very preservation in Jain bhandāras. Valuable texts belonging to these schools were safeguarded with utmost diligence; protecting them against the ravages of time.
A very useful example to show this tendency of the Jains to preserve the texts of other thought systems is that of the Vādī Pārśvanātha temple located in Patan. The significant fact about this collection is the presence of several logic and Advaīt Vedāntic texts which were written down on paper in the first half of the fifteenth century. The case of the Vādi Pārśvanātha temple is reflective of the dedication towards knowledge due to which the Jains ensured that the treatises of other schools do not vanquish with time and remain well preserved. Another very interesting text which comes across to us is the one titled Jainadharmakhanḍanamanḍana (An Ornament for the Destruction of the Jain Dharma) which is preserved in the Amer Shastrabhandara of Jaipur. It is more than amusing and perplexing to see a text aimed at the destruction of Jainism preserved in the library established and maintained by the people of that very sect.
The tradition of commentaries on non-Jain texts by Jain acharyas shows the innate conciliatory and harmonious viewpoint of Jainism in the field of intellectual engagement due to which they were not only gathering authentic knowledge of the principles propounded by the other schools but were also trying to interpret and present those principles through their writings. To further understand the motives of the Jain āchāryas for writing commentaries on the texts of other philosophical systems, one also needs to emphasize the doctrine of Anekanta central to the Jain philosophy which believes in multi-sidedness of truth and therefore, argues in favour of understanding each thought and principle with earnest sincerity and open-mindedness.
A quick survey of the available manuscripts of commentaries written by Jain scholars on non-Jain texts would depict that the Jains were hugely interested in the Sanskrit kavyas and wrote commentaries on writings of great Sanskrit poets like Kālidāsa and Bhāravi. Alike to the trends of preservation, the commentarial tradition found in the Jain Manuscript Culture also had significant interest in the fields of philosophy, logic and epistemology. Several commentaries were written on the texts of non-Jain philosophies like the schools of Nyaya, Sankhya and Vaisheshika.
These commentaries written by Jain scholars should not be seen only through the prism of Jain manuscriptology but should also be placed in the intellectual framework of the respective traditions of the texts on which they were written. Their contribution in the enrichment of the concerned philosophies and thought systems also merits serious scholarly work re-asserting the unique significance of the Jain manuscript tradition in the larger sphere of Indian intellectual discourse. The term Anekantic approach, as suitably coined by Padmanabh Jaini ensured that knowledge in itself irrespective of any other factors was revered and henceforth preserved in the medieval Jain libraries. We can therefore confidently say that the Jains, while engaging in their manuscript tradition; were ultimately serving Indian intellectual tradition heritage whether it was through preservation of manuscripts or through writing nuanced commentaries upon them. It would be appropriate to conclude this article by quoting J.E Cort who says that students of India owe a great debt to the Jains for the hundreds and thousands of invaluable handwritten manuscripts preserved in their many jnān bhandāras.