PHYLLIS GRANOFF

MY RITUALS AND MY GODS: RITUAL EXCLUSIVENESS IN MEDIEVAL INDIA

In an earlier paper I discussed what I called ritual eclecticism, the willingness of one religious group to allow its members to practice rituals that it explicitly acknowledged belonged to another group.1 I began with a quote from the Jain Haribhadra, for whom such eclecticism went so far as to include allowing a ritual that normally divides religious groups; Haribhadra in the Yogabindu recommends that at least lay Jains at some stage in their religious life worship other peoples gods. That this was not a common way of viewing things is clear from numerous stories in Jain literature. Indeed there is a particular class of faults called chindik that accrue to a Jain who worships non-Jain gods, even under .. a duress. In addition, in the widely used Avasyaka sutra, a Jain layman is required to assert his exclusive allegiance to Jainism.2 I begin with a story from the Brhatkathakosa of Harisena of 931932 A.D. that makes . . clear that the worship of non-Jain gods is of no use at all. I had argued that ritual eclecticism required that the groups all believe in the efcacy of the rituals involved, whether they are rituals of their own group or rituals of those outside their group. In a culture of ritual exclusiveness, by contrast, groups are very clear that only their own rituals work. I. THE STORY OF RUDRADATTAS BELOVED, FROM THE
BRHATKATHAKOSA, STORY NUMBER 543 .

In a region in the territory of Lta there was a city called Gudakhedaka, a. . . home to wise men, much money and a plentiful supply of grain. Jinadatta, a pious Jain lay man, lived there with his wife Jinadatt, who was also a devoted to the Jain Faith. They had a daughter Jinamati, steeped in the Jain doctrine. She was skilled in all the arts and endowed with humility. In that same town lived the rich merchant Ngadatta; he had a young a and beautiful wife named Ngadatt. They had a handsome son named a a Rudradatta. He was a delight to all of his family; he was virtuous and a faithful devotee of the god Rudra or Siva. gadatta asked Jinadatta if he would give his daughter Now one day Na Jinamati in marriage to Rudradatta. When Jinadatta heard Ngadattas a
Journal of Indian Philosophy 29: 109134, 2001. c 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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request, he replied, I am an extremely pious Jain and you are equally devoted to your god Siva. There is no way that pious Jains can marry those who believe in Siva; we feel that those who believe in Siva are perverse and stupid in their beliefs. When Rudradatta heard what Jinadatta said, he declared, Really all religions are one; there is no difference between them. Uncle, I will become a Jain right away! With these words Rudradatta hastened to a Jain temple. With lust in his heart a he approached the monk Samdhigupta and abandoning his devotion to Siva he accepted the Jain religion. When Jinadatta learned that Rudradatta had become devoted to the Jain Faith, he gave his daughter Jinamati to him. Once he married the girl, the deceitful Rudradatta renounced the Jain Faith and once more began to follow the Saiva way. One day, after they had eaten and Jinamati was relaxing, Rudradatta saw his chance. He said to her, Lovely one, Siva has proclaimed the ritual of consecration which puts an end to all suffering and is without aw; it is of benet even to miserable, sinful souls. This Saiva consecration is not diminished in its efcacy even by millions of sins. Siva, husband of the goddess of Gaur, has said that it is of benet even to those who are lled with hatred. For it is said in one of the texts,
This pure, awless ritual of consecration destroys all sin. It has been proclaimed by Siva expressly for the benet of the most wretched souls.

This rite of consecration sacred to Siva is still effective even for those people who harbor hatred against their teacher and commit a hundred sins; thus Siva himself proclaimed. Give up your Jain religion, which no important people believe in anyway, and accept the religion of Siva, which grants the happiness of Final Release. When Jinamati heard her husbands words she said to him, My love, I have no intention of giving up my Jain Faith. Why dont you give up your belief in Siva, which is so dear to you, and x rmly in your mind that Jain religion, which is dear to the wise? Now hearing these words of his wife, Rudradatta replied, How can the doctrine of the Jinas be better than the Saiva ritual of consecration? At that Jinamati suggested, Why dont you just continue in your worship of Siva and I will continue in my devotion to the Jina. Her charming husband answered his captivating wife with these words, But I cannot allow you to practice your Jain religion. Thus these two spent much of their time listening to each other discourse on religion, sometimes debating, sometimes quarelling, often arguing. One day Rudradatta said to his wife, who was always respectful and well-behaved, though she continued to be devoted to the doctrine of the Jinas, If I ever catch you going to the Jain temple again or giving

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alms to Jain monks, I will throw you out of this house. But if you go to the temple of Rudra and with faith in your heart give alms to the Saiva ascetrics, then I shall adore you, my lovely wife! When she heard this Jinamati stood her ground, If you force me to do as you say, my master, then I shall die. Or let us try this: you stop going to the temple of Siva and I will no longer go to the Jain temple to worship the image of the Jina. Each one then rashly made a promise to the other, but there they were, living together in that house, each one practicing his own religion. Just to the east of the city Gudakhedaka there was a dense forest . . with many trees. It was inhabited by barbaric people and tribals and was a favorite haunt of tigers, lions and other ferocious beasts. One day a wild horde came out of the forest and descended on the city, setting it ablaze. As the city was engulfed in ame, all the townsmen with their wives and children ran here and there, not knowing what to do. The sky was red with ames as far as the eye could see; gradually the blaze reached Rudradattas house. Jinamati, her lotus-like face beaming, approached her beloved husband Rudradatta, who was devoted to Siva. You have often sung the praises of your devotion to Siva to me, but there was no place for Siva in my heart, which was already given to the Jina. And I in turn often spoke to you about the religion of the Jina, which delights the wise, but you were not impressed. My lord! The god who rescues us from this danger, the god who spares us and our home, let that god be our refuge! When Rudradatta heard Jinamatis words he said, Lovely lady! Well put. What you have said is surely pleasing to the mind. Who can save living beings, if not Siva, husband of Gaur, the one who rides on a bull! How could the universe obey the will of any god other than that one, who brings delight to all the world! How could I even begin to describe the wondrous qualities of that god, who brings all living beings under his sway through his divine play? When Jinamati heard these words she said to her husband, who was deluded and devoted to Siva, If your god has any power, then let him quench this re, o love, without much further ado! Hearing his wifes words, Rudradatta said to his wife, whose entire body shuddered with delight in her great faith in the Jina, O fair-hipped one, what do I care about this trivial re, that will die out anyway? I have all I want, my rm faith in Siva. And having said this to his beloved, Rudradatta took a vessel for worship lled with things like curds and sacred grass. He stood there, muttering some sounds. Rudradatta prayed to Siva. He faced north and poured the contents of the vessel on his own head.

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O protectors of the world! Hear my words!, proclaimed Rudradatta, intent on protecting his world. He went on, If the religion of devotion to Siva is the correct way, and if Siva is the highest god; if the world emerges from his heart at his will, if the consecration ritual leads to Final Release and is truly awless and pure, then may that god Siva protect me and all the world, and all my family, too. But as Rudradatta recited the name of Siva the ames only blazed more brightly and ercely around him, twice as erce, three times as erce. Then Jinamati said to Rudradatta, who by now was quite thoroughly terried, Collect yourself and call upon a different god this time. Obedient to his wifes words he began to call out the name of Brahm, Skanda, Visnu; of Agni, the sun, the moon, the planets, a .. even Gaur. But the re went right on blazing, lighting up everything everywhere with its ames, fanned by a wind as erce as the wind that blows at the end of time. Rudradatta said to his beloved, My love, none of these gods whom the masses worship is really god, who can protect us from this re as we call on him for aid. Worship your Jina, who like the moon gives light in the darkness, o lovely one! Make an offering to him so that we may be saved from this impending disaster. Thus her husband and her children implored Jinamati. Jinamati rst renounced desires for worldly things in thought and in deed. She then made this pronouncement: If there really are Noble Ones, who have reached Omniscience, who are free from all passions and beyond the range of all harm, devoid of lust and delusion; if there truly exists the doctrine of the Jinas, that one should never do violence to a living creature, the doctrine that teaches compassion to all living beings, that is the source of happiness in this world and the next and has been proclaimed by the noble ones; if moreover that doctrine is the true consecration that leads to Final Release and puts an end to all of transmigratory existence, then may it protect me and my husband and children. These words of hers resounded throughout the world. She then made an offering to the Jina and stood silently in meditation. As she was standing there in meditation, her mind rm, the re suddenly vanished along with the horde of barbarians, both terried of her power. The terror that the blazing re had struck in the hearts of the frightened people was also gone, as if it was itself in fear of Jinamati. When he saw that miracle, Rudradatta, calm in mind, renounced his faith in Siva and became a Jain. Many were those who had been unwilling to express any opinion before but who now also became pious lay Jains, rm in the right belief.

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In this story, right belief is synonymous with exclusive belief in the power of the Jina. Siva is a false god and the rituals of his believers are useless. Indeed calling on Brahm, Skanda, Visnu and Agni; calling a .. on the sun, the moon, the planets and even Gaur, is of no avail. In the Buddhist Mahavastu a group of sailors in danger of losing their lives at sea similarly call upon these and other gods with no success; it is only the Buddha who can save them (Mahvastu 199) But in a a rimulakalpa, these are the very gods whose later ritual text, the Manjus mantras do work, as long as they are recited in front of the painted cloth (chapter 6.56) (Granoff 2000). If the Manjusrimulakalpa could make room for other peoples gods and other peoples rituals, this Jain story wants nothing to do with either. In the Manjusrimulakalpa ritual efcacy is tied to faith in general, proper performance and the power of the texts own mantras; in the Jain story about Rudradatta and his clever wife, ritual efcacy is tied to something far more fundamental or elemental: exclusive belief in the right god and the right body of religious doctrine. The ritual exclusiveness of this story corresponds to a broad religious division, between Jains on the one hand, and Hindus on the other. In this case ritual is only a part of a larger complex of practices and religious beliefs that demarcate the two groups. In the story in fact it is belief in the Jina that is given prominence as the main factor that divides Jinamati and her husband; it is impossible to separate the question of ritual efcacy from that larger complex of religious beliefs and practices. Ritual by itself, however, could also serve as an important marker that divided both larger groups like Jains from Hindus, or smaller groups, contending groups of Jain monks, for example. In this paper I would like to examine how rituals can function as dening markers. I will begin with rituals as broad markers and work my way into the conictual world of intrasectarian Jain polemics in late medieval North India. I will argue that the ways in which ritual functions as a marker in these two cases exhibit signicant differences. Ritual as a broad marker between large groups, Jains and Hindus, does not stand alone; as in the story of Rudradatta it requires other markers to delineate successfully one group from the other. It also may prove less stable as a marker in such cases; abandoning the ritual marker does not involve loss of identity and thus can be done with in some cases only minor consequences. By contrast I shall argue here that ritual is most effective as a barrier in dividing small groups, in intra-sectarian rivalry, where the broad markers are shared and minutiae of ritual serve effectively to delineate competing

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groups. In such cases shedding the ritual marker means crossing the line between one group and its opposing group.

II. RITUAL AS A BROAD MARKER: RITUALS FOR PROCURING CHILDREN

IN BUDDHISM AND JAINISM

It is well known that Jains and Buddhists in some of their writings dened themselves with reference to ritual. Jains and Buddhists in their own description of themselves are dened as those who practice a religion of non-violence and therefore reject the inherently violent ritual culture of the Vedic sacrice. Both Jains and Buddhists developed sophisticated arguments against the Vedic sacrice; they were of course not alone in seeing themselves as proponents of a non-violent religion that was anti-sacrice. The commentaries to the Samkhya Karikas similarly reject the Vedic sacrice and dene at least the need for the Smkhya system in terms of the fact that the existing ritual culture is a seriously awed. But the Vedic sacrice was not the only ritual marker for Jains and Buddhists as they sought to dene themselves vis-a vis Hindu culture. Although it would prove to be by far the most stable ritual marker, it was by no means the only one. Jains and Buddhists also saw themselves as distinctive in that they rejected other categories of rituals. One of these is the broad category of rituals to procure children. Buddhist avadana literature and Jain story literature are alike in associating the belief that the performance of rituals could secure the birth of children with the Hindus; such beliefs are laukika, the term they often used to refer to the Hindus. In their writings, Jains and Buddhists see the rejection of such religious beliefs as something that makes them different from the Hindus. A classic statement of the Buddhist attitudes towards rituals to procure children is the following passage from the Avadanasataka (story number 83; 206). It recurs in the same form in many other texts, for example the Mulasarvastivadavinaya and the Mahavastu. Similar statements can also be found in Jain literature. Such descriptions of the conditions for conception in fact closely correspond with what the medical texts tell us (Wujastyk, 1998: 93ff).
Asti caisa pravdo yadycanahetoh putr jyante duhitaraceti. Tacca naivam. a a a a a s . . Yadyevam abhavisyad ekaikasya putrasahasram abhavisyat tad yath rjna a a s . . cakravartinah. Api tu traynm sthnnm sammukh vt putr jyante duhitaraca. a.a . a a a. bha a a a s . . Katamesm traynm? Mtpitarau raktau bhavatah samnipatitau; mt kaly a.a aa aa a . . .a . bhavaty rtumat gandharvaca pratyupasthito bhavati. Etesm traynm sthnnm , s a.a . a a a. . .a . sammukh vt putr jyante duhitaraca. bha a a a s .

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There is this belief that sons and daughters are born in response to petitions to the gods. That is not true. If it were, every man would have a thousand sons, just like a world emperor! Sons and daughters are in fact born when three conditions are fullled. What are the three conditions? The mother and father have to come together with desire for each other; the mother must be healthy and in her fertile season; a gandharva must be there with them. When these three conditions are met, sons and daughters are born.

It is not difcult to see why the rejection of a belief that children can be conceived through religious ritual would set off the Jains and . the Buddhists from the Hindus. Whether we look to the Ramayana or the Raghuvamsa or to later Hindu texts, it is abundantly clear that it . is almost a requirement of a hero that he be conceived under unusual circumstances, and usually as a result of a boon granted by a god or a ritual performed by the would-be parents. The expectation that a god properly worshipped would grant a child lies behind the story of the curse of Vrnas that is told in the Harivamsa chapter 29, and the a a. . . a, Ambikakhanda, chapter 26. Prvat is angry at her Skanda Puran a .. mother for making unkind remarks about Siva; she urges Siva to nd them another place to live, far away from her parents. He decides on Vrnas but must rst empty out the city. He sends his gana Nikumbha, a a. . who appears to a barber in a dream and promises him great wealth if he will make a shrine to Nikumbha and install an image of Nikumbha in it. The barber agrees and eventually the shrine, at the royal gates, becomes quite popular. King Divodsa sends his wife there to pray for a a child. The gana tells her and then her husband that he will not give . them the child they want. Furious at this news, the king smashes the shrine and burns the image. This allows the gana to curse the city and . declare that it shall become abandoned. Thus Vrnas is made ready a a. for Siva to move in. The belief in the ability of a god to grant children becomes if anything more widespread in later medieval times. In late texts like the Gurucarita of Rmacarana Thakur, a biography of the Vaisnava a . . .. leader Sankara Deva written in Assamese, it is difcult to nd even one of Sankaradevas ancestors who was not born through religious ritual, through a petition to a god. By contrast, a medieval Jain story is explicit about the fact that Hindus may believe that the gods grant children, but Jains know better. The Mulasuddhiprakarana was written by the monk Pradyumnasuri . 4 Shortly thereafter, Devacandrasuri added a in the 11th century A.D. commentary containing numerous stories. One of them, the story of Devadinna, Given by the Gods tells of a merchant, a pious Jain, .. who is childless. The king comes to learn of his plight and tells him

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to propitate the royal clain deity, the Goddess Tihuyanadev, Queen . of the Three Worlds. She grants all wishes. The merchants reply is interesting; he assumes that his childlessness is a result of his own bad karma; even if the goddness were to grant him a child, he asks the king, wouldnt the child die soon thereafter as a result of that bad karma? The king seems to ignore this possibility and insists that the merchant worship the goddess for a child. When the merchant comes home and tells his wife, she lets him know in no uncertain terms that it would be wrong for a Jain to resort to such rituals,
nha evam kajjamne sammattalamcchanam bhavissai. a a . . .

My lord! she says, If you do that it will be a blot on your true faith in the Jinas. Her husband decides that if he considers the king to have given him an order to worship the goddess, an order that he cannot disobey, then he will not have sullied his faith in any way by worshipping the goddess. The term the wife uses, sammattalamchanam . . . . is more commonly known as sammattadusana and might be translated as lapse in faith or blot on the faith. A list of these aws appears in the Mulasuddhiprakarana with stories to illustrate them. At the same time, . . . both lapses or aws and the opposite, sammattabhusana, adornments of faith can involve public and private acts and the text tells us that in fact the public act is the most dangerous in its consequences, since it can lead others to follow a false path.5 In another story in the Mulasuddhiprakarana about the lay Jain . Devadhara, a Jain woman is said to be childless because her children all die in infancy. She assumes that this is a result of her karma (Granoff, 1998: 264). Jains and Buddhists were agreed in fact that ill health in general, a category to which childlessness belonged, was a product of bad karma. They rejected ritual as a means to combat disease and to secure children (Granoff, 1998a, 1998b). The story of Devadinna in particular is unambiguous in its statement .. that Jains do not believe in the efcacy of rituals to procure children and that moreover Jains ought not to practice such rituals. The belief in and practice of such rituals divides Jains from Hindus in an apparently clear case of the use of a class of rituals as a marker between large religious groups, between Jains and Hindus. Haribhadra, our proponent of ritual eclecticism in his Yogabindu, reserved some of his most biting sarcasm for Hindus and their religious texts precisely on this issue of conceiving children through supernatural means. One of his most famous texts, the Dhurtakhyana, is a scathing . as. Some of the attack on the Hinduism of the epics and the Puran most outrageous sections ridicule the Hindus beliefs in supernatural

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conceptions. I now give a translation of a section of the Dhurtakhyana in its Sanskrit version of 1365 A.D. by Samghatilaka. I have added a short paragraph to make the context of the story clear.
(A group of clever rogues had made a wager. Each was to tell the other something fabulous that he or she had experienced; the person who could prove it a lie lost the wager and was to invite all the others to dinner; the person who could prove . it true, using the words of the Puranas, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the . sruti texts, was the winner, king or queen of the rouges gallery.)

s Saa was silenced and turned to the lady Khand. Now you, clever . .a lady, tell us something that you have experienced. She said, I shall speak, then, in your most august company. But if you will but admit defeat and bow down to me, I will buy you all dinner tonigth. They answered her, We are the best among men. Why should we humble ourselves and beg a lady to offer us dinner? With a smile, Khand went on, Listen then, be all ears. I will tell . .a you something that has happened to me. It is the absolute truth. Once, when I was in the bloom of my youth, when my charm owed over and I was as beautiful as Rati, wife of the god of love; when I was a veritable cask of wine to bring about the intoxication of sexual desire, I was also a woman of somewhat loose morals. Now one day I had taken my bath after my menses were over and I was sleeping in an open pavilion. The wind took me there in secret, as a man takes his lover. From that union I gave birth to a child, who abandoned me and vanished into thin air, like something seen in a dream. Now you tell me, if what I say is true, wise men, then what woman in this world would ever be considered a slut! a Muladeva said to Khand, Kunt had Bhmasena and Anjan had . .a Hanumn, both fathered by the wind. Vysa was born of the sage a a Paraurma in the womb of a sherwoman. He said to his mother, s a Call me when you need me, and off he disappeared, into the forest. And his mother, who stunk so much you could smell her a mile away, became a virgin again just at the say-so of the sage. She became the a lover of Sntanu and gave birth to Vicitravrya. When Viritravrya died, she called on the sage Vysa, Krsnadvpyana. She told him that their a a .. . line was going to die out, because there was no son. My child! You must see to it that the lineage grows. He did save the lineage by fathering king Pndu, king Dhrtarstra, lord of the realm, and Vidura, a. . . a. the most wise. Vysa became a father, having had sex with the three a women, and then he cursed them saying, Alas, alas woe is me! Those wicked women have caused me to sin by abandoning my chastity. For it is said,

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The one who keeps pure with regard to food, sex, and deeds, no matter where he goes, he will never think to commit a sin.

If the story of the births of Bhma, Anjaneya and Vysa are true, a then why should we not believe in your account of how you gave birth to a son fathered by the wind? Khand continued. I was once friends with the goddess Gaur. She . .a gave me a mantra which had the ability to summon the gods. I used the mantra to summon the sun with its erce rays. He ravished me and fathered on me a mighty son. The sun burns the earth, which is 86 thousand yojanas in extent; why was I not burned to smithereens when my body was joined with him? Kandarka replied, If Kunt, having sex with the sun, was not burnt .. up, then you slut, why should you have been burnt to smithereens? Khand went on. I summoned blazing Fire. He too embraced me . a and gave me a powerful son. The sun burns from afar, but re burns when it touches the body. Why was I not burned by him as we made love? Elsdha replied, Dhumorn, wife of Yama, went to the abode of a.a . .a Agni to make a re offering, but instead she made love with Agni. While she was making love like that, she realized that Yama had followed her. Desperate, and unable to run away, she swallowed Agni as if he were so much water. Yama in turn swallowed her up, just as she was, in the heat of her passion, half undressed. He then went straight to the assembly of the gods. When the gods said to him, We welcome . you, and the other two, as well, he vomited up Dhumorna and she vomited up Agni. Yama ran after Agni, who vanished into a forest. The elephants refused to tell Yama where Agni was hiding, so he deprived them foreover of the ability to speak. Now if the wife of Yama, the Lord of Death, was not burned when she made love to Agni, O Khand, . .a why should you have been burned when you had sex with him? Khand resumed her story. I summoned Indra, the one who rides . .a the elephant Airvana. He too had sex with me and fathered a son on a . me. Tell me, why would the lord of the gods have sex with me, when he could have all those goddesses? s Saa had a ready answer. Didnt he once have sex with Ahaly, wife a of the sage Gautama? And Gautama, furious, made a thousand vulvas on his body, and wicked as he was, Gautama then told the brahmin boys to have fun with them. Indra, lord of the gods, was mightily troubled by those sex-starved boys, who didnt know right from wrong. The gods then begged Gautama to take pity on Indra and he relented and somehow turned the thousand vulvas into a thousand eyes. And

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Kunt gave birth to a son, Arjuna, from Indra. Would anyone who knew the Hindu religious texts, then, dare to deny that you had a son from Indra? A reader of the story of Devadinna and this hilarious tale by Khand .. . .a would be I think entirely convinced that the refusal to perform rituals for conceiving children played an important role in the Jains self-denition. Medieval Jains would seem to have taken pride in the fact that they were different from the Hindus precisely because they did not believe in absurdities like supernatural births. What is particularly interesting for us, however, is that in medieval India nothing is quite as simple as it looks. If Haribhadra in the Yogabindu could urge Jains to worship other gods and practice other rituals at the same time as he could poke such fun at those very gods and rituals, then perhaps we should not be surprised to see Jains described in their own literature as practicing the very rituals that they so categorically reject. Even if Haribhadra of the Yogabindu is not the Haribhadra of the Dhurtakhyana, and that too is a possibility, we are still faced with two incompatible Jain viewpoints on ritual. And as we shall see below, a wider reading of Jain texts offers us a much more complicated understanding of how rituals functioned in medieval Jain self denition. I think we can also begin to formulate some hypotheses on the larger question of when and how rituals served as boundary markers between groups in medieval Jainsim. III. THE AMBIGUITIES OF RITUAL MARKERS:
JAINS WORSHIPPING FOR CHILDREN

Considering the discussion above, it would no doubt surprise a reader of the 14th century Prabandhakosa of Rjaekhara to read the following a s (1935: 84),
dhankaparvate surstrbhusanaatrunjayagiriikharaikadearupe rjaputraranasimhasya a.. a . . s s s a . . . a a m m a s aa a a bhopalnmn . putr . rupalvanyasampurnm payato jtnurgasya sevamnasya . .a . vsukingasya putro ngrjunanm jtah a a a a a a a .

Ngrjuna was born of the son of the Nge (Snake) Vsuki, who was consumed a a a a with lust when he saw the beautiful and charming princess Bhopal, daughter of the a prince Ranasimha, and made love to her on Mt. Dhanka somewhere on a peak of . . . . Satrunjaya, which is the glory of the land of Surstra. a. .

Or this description of the birth of Ngrjunas mentor, the monk and a a famous wizard Pdaliptasuri, from the 15th century commentary by a Dharmaghosa to the Saturnjayakalpa (1969: 82). . a there reigned King Vijaya, a righteous ruler. His In the city of Kos valiant minister was a veritable ocean of wisdom on how properly to

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conduct affairs of state. The merchant appointed to the court was a pious Jain named Phulla. He was wise and generous. Phulla had a virtuous and excellent wife named Pratimn. She was childless and suffered a.a greatly in her longing to have a child. She asked everyone what she should do and she gave out plenty of money in her keen desire to have a child. Now one day Pratimn worshipped the goddess Vairothy, a.a . a lled with faith. The goddess appeared to her at once and said, My child! Why did you summon me? Tell me what you need from me. Pratimn replied, Right now I need a son. Vairothy told her, There a.a . a is a monk who has crossed the wide ocean of every conceivable form of a knowledge. He belongs to the lineage of the Vidydharas and his name is Glorious Klikcrya. To that same monastic lineage belongs another a a a excellent monk of impeccable conduct named Glorious Aryangahastika. a It so happens that he is here right now. If you drink the water that he has used to wash his feet, then you will get even more than you have wished for. At that Pratimn was lled with joy. She hastened to see a.a the monk. When she got there, she saw that a disciple of the monk was holding a bowl lled with the water that the monk had used to wash his feet; she wrested it from him and drank it down, lled with faith. And then that merchants wife bowed down to the Noble Aryangahastika a instructed me to drink the water you have used and said, Vairothya . to wash your feet and so that is what I have done. The monk said, Righteous lady! Since you were standing at a distance of ten furlongs from me when you drank the water, your rst son will have a stature of ten furlongs in measure. He will be a vast ocean of wisdom, of that you may be certain. You will have nine other ne children after him. The merchants wife said, I will give you my rst born. It is not just famous monks who are born in unusual ways. In the Kuvalayamala, the prince Kuvalayacandra is born after his father propitiates the royal clan deity and is prepared to offer his head to her in sacrice (1970: 14.415.15). Even Devadinnas fathers prayers .. offered to his kings royal goddess were not without effect; the goddess, to protect her own reputation as the giver of boons, gives to the reluctant Jain worshipper the son he prays for. Jains were not alone in accepting the efcacy of prayers for conceiving children in some of their texts; the Buddhists, the other group who had rejected this whole category of rituals, could do the same, albeit somewhat begrudgingly. In a story in the Mahavastu, for example, we read of a merchant named Yaoda s who is childless. Non-Buddhists all worship a certain banyan tree that they wrongly believe grants all wishes, a belief, we are told, that got

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started when by chance someone worshipped the tree and happened to get what he asked for. Yaoda threatens the tree, saying that he will s cut it down if he does not get the son that he wants. The tree spirit panics and Indra must come to the rescue. Indra orders a soul that is about to fall from heaven to be born as the son of the irate Yaoda s (1968v.3: 535552). In this odd story, the petitioner gets his child, but not quite through the ritual of propitiating the tree spirit. The story seems to admit that sometimes such rituals work, but not because they are inherently capable of producing the desired results. They work through the intervention of a god, Indra, in whose power Buddhists did believe.6 In another story in the Mulasarvastivadavinaya, a king Sakuna is despondent because he has no offspring. Again it is Indra who comes to his aid, bringing magic herbs from Mount Gandhamdana. a All but one of the kings wives eat herbs and become pregnant. The chief queen, who had lain in bed ill while her cowives drank the potion of herbs, later drinks the water used to wash the grass vessels that the others had used; she become pregnant with Kua, Grass, who was s the Buddha in a former life (1967: 6263). The evidence from early Buddhist iconography, for example at Gandhra, suggests that it was not a just in their stories that Buddhists worshipped yaksas for children. I am . thinking here of the numerous sculptures of Hrit, whose story was told a in the Mulasarvasvivadavinaya and related texts. One text preserved in Chinese translation explicitly states that Hrt was worshipped by a those who desire children (Taisho 1262). The Saddharmapundarka, .. samantamukha parivarta, promises unamabiguously that worshipping Avalokitevara grants children.7 s There are indications in some Jain stories that their acceptance of supernatural births, whether of children directly fathered by gods or of children given by the gods in answer to prayer and ritual, was also somewhat reluctantly granted. In the Prabandhakosa biography of the King Stavhana, we read of a young widow who is looked after by a a her two brothers. One day she goes down to the river Godvar to fetch a water. There the snake Sesa sees her and is stricken with desire for her. . He assumes human form and ravishes her. She becomes pregnant with the future king. The text explains, p. 66,
bhavitavyatvilsitena tasyh saptadhturahitasypi tasya divyaakty a a a. a a s a ukrapudgalasamcrd garbhdhnam abhavat. s a a . aa And fate so ordained it that she became pregnant; although the snake did not have the normal seven constituents that make up a human body, by its divine power it somehow caused material particles of sperm to pass into her.

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The Jain author, no doubt heir to a popular story about the miraculous conception of King Stavhana, seems ill at ease with a snake-god a a fathering a son with a human woman. He seeks some semi-natural explanation for the miraculous event. The examples of Jain stories in which the hero or heroine has a supernatural birth could be multiplied, but the stories cited here should sufce to show that it would be hasty to conclude from the stories of the Mulasuddhiprakarana and the Dhurtakhyana that the rejection . of rituals to conceive children constituted a stable mark of medieval Jain self-identity. By contrast, Jain rejection of the sacrice would remain a distinguishing characteristic of Jainsim throughout its history. I know of no stories, for example, that allow Jains to sacrice animals. I would not, I might add, say the same of the Buddhists; Buddhist avadana literature with its stories of often bloody self-sacrice, animal and human, suggests that the sacrice crept back into the Buddhist religious world, if not in actual performance, at least in literature. Indeed, the Buddha is said to have accumulated merit in past lives by performing sacrices. Thus, for example, in the Mulasarvastivadavinaya the Buddha in a past birth as a king Nimi erected sacrical pits at the four gateways to his city and performed lavish sacrices (1967: 71)8 The different fate of these two rituals in Jainism, I think, must lead us to ask about the role of ritual boundaries that divide different religions from each other. I would like to suggest that in the case of religions that are already as distinct from each other as Jainism and Hinduism were, ritual boundaries are not good markers of self-identity. The prohibition of the sacrice remained, not because it was the marker of Jain self-identity, but because sacrice conicted with the doctrine of non-violence, which was essential to Jain identity. By contrast, the prohibition against performing rituals to secure children could be set aside in popular imagination and I suspect also in practice. I would like to suggest as an hypothesis for testing that ritual boundaries are in general not effective ways of demarcating different religious groups; they are simply too porous. I would like to turn now to an arena in which I would argue that ritual boundaries are the primary boundaries between groups. This is the arena of intra-sectarian conict, where there are no large or broad boundary markers; where groups accept the same gods, the same sacred texts and the same basic principles of doctrine and yet see each other as having irreconcilable differences. I will offer in my next section some examples of Jain intra-sectarian conict, where I will argue, it is primarily ritual differences that set the groups apart.

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IV. RITUAL AS PRIMARY BOUNDARY MARKERS: INTRA-SECTARIAN

CONFLICTS IN MEDIEVAL JAINISM

a Medieval Svetmbara Jainism was characterized by the formation of various monastic lineages, called gacchas, which were often in competition with each other for patronage from the lay community (Granoff, 1992; Dundas, 1992: 103129). One of the more vocal polemicists, a a the 16th century monk Dharmasgara of the Tapgaccha, has left us a number of vituperative attacks on rival sects. Even a cursory review of his texts reveals that for the most part the divisions between the different groups have to do not with doctrine, which is shared, but with minutiae of ritual. Thus groups differed on what days it was appropriate to perform various religious rituals; on how many times certain formulaic statements of faith were to be made in a given ritual and when; they differed on the order in which elements of the ritual were to be performed and whether worship of images and of what images constituted a valid form of Jain ritual.9 One of the earliest of Jain intra-group polemics can be found in the 11th century writings of the Kharataragaccha, the group against whom Dharmasgara railed most loudly. We have a number of short a Apabhrama verse compositions by the Kharatara monk Jinadatta in .s which Jinadatta vents his spleen against others who differed from the position of the Kharatara monks. The Kharatara monks saw themselves as restoring the purity of a monastic community that had become corrupt. It is interesting to read the texts, for they indicate that many of the objections that the Kharatara had against their contemporaries concerned ritual and not scholastic interpretation of doctrine (1967).10 Thus in his Caccari Jinadatta objects to rituals being carried out at night (verse 16); he objects to offerings being made in the temple at night and to ceremonies of consecration taking place at night (1718) He objects to the images being taken out on chariots at night and to carrying out such rituals as setting the gods up on swings and swinging them or allowing the gods to enjoy water sports. (19) Jinadatta also rejects special rituals in the temple at the time of the equinoxes or an eclipse. No woman is ever allowed to touch the Jina image and articles used in the worship of one image are not then to be reused for the worship of a second image (24). It is likely that some of the rituals that Jinadatta rejects had come into Jainism from Hinduism, perhaps as part of the eclectic ritual culture of which I spoke earlier. I would count among these the worship of the Jinas at the time of the equinoxes and eclipses, typical times for increased rituals in Hinduism, and the festivities in which the gods

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were allowed to enjoy water sports or were put on a swing. It seems possible to argue that in his objections to rituals like these, Jinadatta was rejecting aspects of the larger eclectic ritual culture in an effort to dene a true Jain identity. At the same time, however, there is no question that his main preoccupation in a text like the Carccar is with intra-sectarian conict; he repeatedly speaks of the false Jain monks. His text is not directed towards outsiders, but was written with his fellow Jains as the intended audience. And in the conict with his fellow Jains, for Jinadatta the proper observance of ritual was the central issue. Jinadatta denes the correct Jains, the true Jain monks as those who worship in a temple where the rules he outlines are followed. Rules of ritual separate the true Jains from the false. The use of ritual boundaries in intra-sectarian conict, however, was not without its own hazards. As in any denition, rules of ritual could prove too restrictive or too inclusive, to constitute a viable boundary between the competing groups. I give rst an example of a ritual rule that seems to have been too restrictive. Here is verse 19 of the Caccar ,
jahim rayanihi rahabhamanu kayi na kriyai a a . . . laudrasu jahim purisu vi dimtau vriyai a .a . . jahi jalak. amdolana humti na devayah d . . . mhamla na nisiddh kayaatthhiyahi a a .. a (The proper temple) is one in which at night the images are never carried around on chariots; where men are not permitted to play with clubs and the gods are not taken to play in water or swing on swings. It is allowed, however, for someone who has performed the ceremony of eight days worship to place a garland on the images even in the month of Mgha. a

The commentary of Jinapla on the last line of the verse is as follows: a

mghe msi viesena snndipurvakam pratimy mlropanam tad api a a s . . a a a a aa . . na nisiddham krtsthniknm rvaknm asthnik hi vatapujs t a . .a a a . s a a.a sas a a . . . . .a avayam krys tca kurvadbhir yadyes pi kriyate tad kriyatm. etacca s . a a as a a .a . .a a digambarabhaktbhinavaprabuddhapelhakarvakoparodhena prabhutataradusanbhvena a sa coktam, tena mhamlajalak . dolana itydivstavasrvadikamghamlnisedhena a a lam a a a a aa . . rasyanoktena na virodha ityarthah a . Specically in the month of Mgha it is still permitted for a lay discipline who a has performed the Eight Days Worship to place a garland on the image after the rituals such as bathing the image have been completed. Naturally all the regular ceremonies of worship must be carried out during the Eight Days Worship, and if during those rituals, the placement of the garland is also carried out, well then, let it be carried out. Now in fact this is permitted only in response to the pleas of a lay discipline Pelhaka, who was formerly a Digambara and has been newly awakened to the truth of the Kharatara position; it is allowed with the understanding that it does not involve any grave fault. This removes any doubt that what is aid here contradicts the general prohibition of placing garlands on the images in the month of Mgha. a That prohibition is stated in the Rasyana. a

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We are fortunate in having the Upadesarasayana to which the commentary here refers. There in verse 39 we do indeed nd a general prohibition against mahamala-jalaklamdolaya, the placement of . garlands on the images during the month of Mgha, letting the gods a enjoy water sports and swing. Jinadatta, in prohibiting such rituals, does dene a distinct identity for the new Kharatara group to which he belongs, but he runs the risk of alienating recent converts. The Upadesarasayana seems clearly to have been the earlier text; by the time of the Caccar, Jinadatta had come to the conclusion that ritual boundaries, although very effective in intra-sectarian conicts, could also result in the isolation of the group from its desired clientel. In the terms of the Indian philosopher, the use of the rule against garlanding the image in the month of Mgha as a boundary marker between the a Kharatara followers and other Jain groups is avyapta or under-extended; it would have left out the newly converted former Digambara disciple.11 In my next example, the use of ritual to dene the boundaries between two rival Jain groups ran into trouble because it could be argued that the denition was overextended, ativyapta, admitting into the fold those whom one wishes to keep out. We are back to Dharmasgara, the a 16th century Tapgacch polemicist. In his Sodasaslok, Dharmasgara a a a . argues against a group whom he identies as the Tristutikas (121). These Jains object to the worship of any gures other than the Jinas. In particular, they objected to the worship of the protective goddess of the Faith, the Srutadevat. The argument that the Tristutikas offer is a that the Jina is all powerful and therefore there is no need to worship any other being, who by denition would have to be less powerful. They make an explicit comparison between the worship of the Jain Srutadevat and the worship of Hindu goddesses. Their argument is a given in the form of an inference:
sanadevatstutih samyaktvamlinyahetuh, devatstutivt, cmunddistutivad. sa a a a a a . a . .

Worship of the presiding goddess of the faith is a cause for dishonoring the right Faith, because it is worship of a goddess(god), like the worship of goddesses (or gods) such as Cmund. a . a

The Tristutikas in effect urge against the Jains who worship the Srutadevat, and this is most image-worshipping Jains, that such worship a constitutes an offense against Right Faith, Samyaktvamalinya. This is the same offense that Devadinnas father was accused of committing in .. the story from the Mulasuddhiprakarana that I cited earlier. It is both . a personal lack of faith and a public dishonor to the Faith. The rely is given that this inference of the Tristutikas is contradicted by scripture (p. 122), where it is proclaimed that worship of the presiding

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goddess of the faith in fact assists in the acquisition of the seeds of enlightenment. The scriptural support cited is the Thananga, 426: .
pamcahim thnehim j sulahabohiyattae kammam pakaremti, tam . . . a . . . a. . va . . . arahamtnam vannam vadamne, arahamtapannattassa dhammassa vannam vadamne, a a . a. .. . .. .. yayariyauvajjhynam vannam vadamne cuvannassa samghassa vannam vadamne, a a a. . a. a a. .. .. . .. vivakkabambhacernam devnam vannam vadamne tti a. . a. . a .. There are ve ways in which souls can act that will assist them in their quest for Enlightenment. They can praise the Arhats, praise the dharma proclaimed by the Arhats, praise the teachers and masters, praise the four-fold Jain community of monks, nuns and male and female lay disciples, and praise the gods whose religious observances have come to fruition.12

Dharmasgara adds that the Tristutika inference is also marred by having a a counter inference (satpratipaksatva): .
sanadevatstutir na samyaktvamlinyahetuh gamopadistatvt t sa a a a . a . . a rthakardistutivat yadv sanadevatstutir na samyatvamlinyahetuh samyaktvahetur v samyagdrstia sa a a a . .. devatstutitvt, t nkarajanmdyutsavdipravacanaprabhvanparyanapurandarasa a rtha a a a a a .

tutiriva The worship of the presiding goddess of the faith is not a cause for dishonoring the Right Faith or, the worship of the presiding goddess of the faith is a cause for right Belief, because it is worship of a Jain deity, like the worship of Indra, who is devoted to furthering the Jain cause, which is performed at the celebration of the birth of the t rthankara and at other celebrations. .

The further argument is also made by Dharmasgara that things of a lesser power can sometimes perform services that the greater cannot; the sun cannot illuminate a room without windows, while a lamp can do the task. But then the Tristutika asks a startling question. Here is what he says:
nanu tarhi samyagdrstidevatto labhyasya rthasya prptaye laukikadevattvena a a a . .. prat nm cmundd m rdhanam kurvatm katham laukikamithytvam? ta a a . a na a a a. a . But in that case, then how could you say that a person who worshipped Hindu gods like the Goddess Cmund, having been unable to get what he or she desired a . a from a Jain god, would be guilty of the sin of false belief and practice?

The assumption behind this question seems simple; Hindu gods are indeed gods, although less powerful perhaps than the Jain gods. If you allow the worship of any being other than the Trthankara on the grounds that sometimes lesser beings can do what the more powerful cannot, then how could you make the rule that Jains must never worship Hindu gods? The question is very much a question about using the performance or rejection of a ritual to dene religious identity, and it raises serious problems for Dharmasgara because of the nature of a

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medieval Indian ritual culture. In an eclectic ritual culture, as we have seen earlier, the assumption is that other peoples rituals do indeed work. That being the case, the Tristutika now asks, how can ritual be used to demarcate different religious groups from each other? What began as an intra-sectarian dispute has now widened into a question of establishing Jain identity altogether, dening Jains against Hindus and not simply one group of Jains against another. Here is Dharamasgaras reply: a
ucyate mithytvam tvad vaiparityaraddhnam. tacca vastuviparyayabodh d bhavati. a . a s a a a a vastuviparyayvabodhas tu jagadudaravartinah sarvasypi . obhanrthasya samyagdr stisdhyatve pi tadasdhyatvaparijnnt, samyagdrm a a s a a . .. a . sa a a a pravacanpratikulrthaprthany mithydrstito phalavattve pi phalavattvaparijnncca a a a a a . .. a mithydrstidevatrdhane bhavatyeva/pravacanapratiku lrthaprrthanym tu sutarm a .. aa a a a. a mithytvam a

The answer is this. First of all you must know that falsehood is dened as wrong belief. Wrong belief results from conceiving objects as they are not. And surely to think that all of the good things in the world are not obtained from belief in the Jain doctrine, when indeed they are, qualies as an example of conceiving something to be what it is not. Indeed, to ask for something that would further the cause of the Jain faith and to think that it can be obtained from one of the Hindu gods, when it cannot be so obtained, also is to conceive of things as they are not. I need not go into the case of asking for something that would not be in the interest of the Jain faith; it goes without saying that such an act would be a false act.

Dharmasgaras answer rejects the eclectic ritual culture. He denies a categorically that any good can come from the worship of Hindu gods. That this was not the usual Jain answer may be seen in stories like that of Devadinna, where the goddess did indeed give the petitioner the son .. he wanted. But I suspect that Dharmasgara knew exactly what he was a doing. Ritual boundaries are not terribly effective in an eclectic ritual culture. What makes them so effective in intra-sectarian politics, in the ght between different groups of monks, was that within the Jain community ritual ceased to be eclectic and became exclusive. Texts like those of Jinadatta were designed to set the rules for what was allowed as ritual, at least in the temple, and they were intolerant of other ways of doing things. That they had sometimes to compromise is also clear from the reference in the commentary to Jinadattas relaxation of a rule for a former Digambara disciple. This was, however, probably an exception. In the main the attitude in intra-sectarian debates towards other ways of doing things is inexible. There are no porous boundaries in sectarian disputes. I would like to consider just briey what I interpret to be a Hindu example of the same attitude at a period in time not too far from Jinadatta and the early Kharatara monks. In 1169/1170 A.D. Balllasena wrote a

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his Danasagara, which was primarily an effort to codify the correct ritual behavior. But Balllasena, like Jinadatta, was not just describing a rituals. Like Jinadatta, he is making the performance of the correct rituals the dening mark of the proper religious specialist, in this case, the Brhmin priest. By extension, those members of the community a who participate in the rituals described under the guidance of the proper ritual specialist, he considers to be following the true religious path. The others, Balllasena makes clear, are heretics and scoundrels. That a Balllasena is using the performance of certain rituals and the rejection a of others as the dividing line between orthodox and heterodox emerges from a reading of some of his comments in his introduction to the text. The Danasagara is essentially a compendium of quotes on rituals of . dana from various puranas. Balllasena includes in his introduction a some comments on why he used some texts and excluded others when he made his selections. I think that he rejects at least some texts because they advocate the practice of certain rituals with which Brahmins should never be involved in his opinion. These rituals have to do with worship in temples, with consecration of images, for example, and with other rituals that we associate with priests who also worship in temples, for example the rituals of dksa. Here are some excerpts from the passage . 13 in question. Balllasena starts by saying that sometimes he has not used certain a texts simply becaues they do not contain any material on dana:
bhgavatam purnam brahmndamcaiva nrad nca/ a a. . a. . . a ya . dnavidhiunyam etat trayam iha na nibaddham avadhrya//57 a s a Realizing that the Bhgavata, Brahmnda and Nrad have no rules concerning a a. . a ya dna, I did not use them here. a

Sometimes, he says, he has not bothered with certain texts because they merely duplicate what is to be found elsewhere:
brhad api lingapurnam matsyapurnoditair mahdnaih/ a. a. a a . avadhrya tulyasram dnanibandhe tra na nibaddham//58 a a . a

And I didnt include excerpts in the present digest on dna from the Larger a a. Lingapurna since the prescriptions there are really the same as those that are given in the Matsyapurna. a.

But what he says next is by far more interesting. Balllasena sees some a Purnic texts interestingly as corrupted by the inuence of heretics, a. . . . pasandi:
saptamyaiva purnam bhavisyam api samgrh a. a . . tam atiyatnt/ . tyaktvs.am a . t navamyau kalpau psandibhir grastau // 59 a. . .

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I carefully collected passages from the Bhavisya Purna up through the seventh a. . section, but I rejected the eighth and ninth sections because they have been corrupted by heretics.

After some comments on texts he did not use because they had nothing new to add to the subject, he continues to excoriate certain texts and certain groups because they are heretical.
pracaradrupatah skandapurnaikmato dhikam/ a. a . s . yat khandatritayam paundrarervantikathraym/ a as .. . .. trksyam purnam aparam brhmam gneyam eva ca/ a . . a. a a . trayovimatishasramitam laingam purnam aparam tath/ a a. a .s . . d . pratisthpsandayuktiratnapar . akaih/ ksa ks . .. a a. . . mrsvamsnucaritah koavykarandibhih/ s a . a . a . .a . asangatakathbandhaparasparavirodhatah/65 a tanm naketand m bhandapsandalinginm/ a na . a . . a. . . lokavancanam lokya sarvam evvadh a a ritam// 66 tattatpurnopapurnasamkhybahiskrtam kamalakarmayogt/ a. a. a s a . . . . psandastrnumatam nirupya dev nam na nibaddham atra// 67 a . . . sa a pura . . .

I have also left out the three additional sections to the Skandapurna dealing a. with stories about Paundra, Rev (Rer) and Avant which are just so much popular a a , .. lore. And as for the Trksya Purna, Brhma and Agneya Purnas and the other a . a. a a. Linga Purna, which has 23,000 verses, I have not touched a one of these, with a. their rituals for d . and pratisth; their sections on heretical logic and the examksa .. a ination of jewels, on false descriptions of royal lineages, sections on grammar and dictionaries; these texts are lled with nonsense and they blatantly contradict each other. I rejected categorically these texts, seeing how they were devised by false ascetics like M naketana and others, just to deceive people. I also did not take any material from the Dev na for my digest, seeing that it has been recognized by pura . the heretics as one of their own texts; indeed it does not deserve to be numbered among the Purnas and Upapurnas, including as it does despicable rituals. a. a.

It is not possible to identify Balllasenas psandas with one a a. . . hundred-percent certainty. Indeed scholarship on the Senas has seen the dynasty as pro-Brahmin and anti-Buddhist, responsible in no small degree for the decline of Buddhism in Bengal. But I think that at least in these verses Balllasena is not attacking the Buddhists; he is attacking a Hindus and Hindu texts that he feels cross the line, a line that is ritual boundary. Balllasena hates certain texts because they include material a that he feels should be irrelevant to the religious role of the Brahmins, the subject of his Danasagara. He wants nothing to do with certain rituals, like dksa and pratis.tha, perhaps the central rituals of gamic . a . Hinduism. I see in these verses the same kind of intra-sectarian conict that inames Jinadattas writing; Balllasenas anger is directed against a those in his own fold who have strayed from the true path. And the focus of his anger is, I suspect, certain priests who have accepted temple . rituals as part of their religious duties. Given the way in which Puranas continued to develop over the centuries, we can never know exactly

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what texts Balllasena had that displeased him.14 But if we do look at a . the present Agnipurana, we nd that it is lled with rituals that deal with temple worship. There is extensive praise of making temples and images scattered throughout the text and instructions for rituals like pratis.tha. There are also sections on royal lineages, appraising jewels, . and even on grammar, all topics which Balllasena explicitly notes. But a it is hard to see why grammar or dictionaries would have so aroused his . ire, and so I suspect that his real problem was with dksa and pratis.tha, . and with the growing absorption of Brahmins into certain aspects of the temple cults. Balllasena does acknowledge the practice of image worship in the a public setting of the temple; the concluding sections of the text deal with offerings of lamps and cows in Saiva and Vaisnava temples. But .. a for Balllasena in this text participation in temple worship is restricted to gift giving. In these chapters there are no instructions for rituals to consecrate images and there is no praise of cleaning or sweeping the temples, rituals that orthodox priests would object to in other texts.15 Balllasena notes that he had written elsewhere, in the a Pratis.thasagara, now lost, about the gifting of bodies of water, tanks . and wells, for example, and temples.16 It is impossible to guess what rituals he had included in his text and thus to assess more precisely what it was about pratis.tha and dksa that he found unacceptable. Was it the . . involvement of Brahmins in these rituals at all that disturbed him or was it the way that certain texts described the rituals that bothered him? We will never know for certain. The Krtyakalpataru of Laksmdhara . . of roughly the same date includes a section on pratis.tha. There is . a long quote from the Devpurana, one of the texts that Balllasena . a ana assigns the role of ofciating . particularly dislikes (66). The Devpur priest to those who are knowledgeable in the Saivasiddhnta for Siva a and the Pncartra for Visnu. It also mentions the Bhutatantra and the a a .. Vetlatantra and states that a consecration performed by someone outside a the gamic tradition is harmful. Perhaps then Balllasena objects to the a a growing inuence of Tantric and Agamic forms of worship that we see in this passage from the Devpurana. Perhaps he objects to considering . the priests of the Pncartra or Saiva Siddhnta as orthodox. In any a a a case, I see in these opening comments of the Danasagara an effort to establish clear ritual boundaries by limiting what rituals are to be performed and how. Like others that we have examined in this paper, however, these ritual boundaries would also in the long run not be entirely successful in dening normative religious identity, a subject to which I hope to return.

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V. CONCLUSION I have argued in this presentation that there were many Jain responses to the eclectic ritual culture that I described earlier. Jains could and did thoroughly reject the rituals of other groups and could even dene themselves as belonging to a religion that refused to do what the others did. This was true for example with the ritual culture of the Vedic sacrice that both Jains and Buddhists categorically rejected. But I have tried to argue that using the performance or rejection of a class of rituals as a dening mark was not as easy as it may seem. Jains and Buddhists both rejected another class of rituals, rituals to conceive children. They rejected the rituals and the very notion that gods could give children to mortals or father children on mortals. A wider reading of the literature reveals, however, that such rejections were not absolute. There are many examples of Jain stories in which the hero or heroine was the product of just such supernatural circumstances. Ritual boundaries did not seem to work as a means to separate Jains from Hindus, perhaps because their exibility did not really threaten religious identity in the presence of so many other differentiating features. I further speculated that ritual boundaries were most often used and most effectively used when those other markers were absent in cases of intra-sectarian disputes, rivalries between different groups of Jain monks. Here too, however, there were limits to the effectiveness of rituals as dividing lines. Restriction of rituals could be too limiting; people seem to have been reluctant to give up the practices to which they were accustomed and making converts was made difcult by too rigid an adherence to rules of ritual. Conversely, ritual markers could be too broad. Allowing worship of some gods opened the door to worship of all gods, according to some Jain monks. The only answer was to retreat from ritual itself as a marker and impose another distinction between the groups. Rituals to true gods were good rituals and rituals to false gods were not allowed. But the distinction between true and false had rst to be made on other grounds. In a further essay I hope to show that those grounds were often not even primarily religious, but could indeed have more to do with the very practical concerns of linguistic and regional identity, over which the veneer of disagreement about rituals was then carefully laid.

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NOTES That paper and the present one were part of a series of four lectures I delivered in a seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales on February 24, 2000. I thank Professors Gilles Tarabout and Grard Colas for inviting me to e participate and I thank all present for their stimulating comments. For the paper on ritual eclecticism see Granoff (2000). 2 I have translated some of the stories of the chindika in an article, Being in the .. Minority: Medieval Jain Reactions to other Religious Groups (Granoff, 1994) My reference to the Avasyaka comes from Paul Dundas (1992) 149. 3 This translation is substantially the same as the translation that appeared in my anthology, Granoff (1998) 237243. 4 I have translated the story in Granoff (1998: 315). 5 My earlier translation of the story was an effort to capture both these implications of the term. 6 On the similar intervention of Indra in Buddhist healing stories see Granoff (1998b). 7 See Pri (1918: 1102, particularly 69). Pri suggests that the worship of e e Avalokitevara to procure children was more widespread than the worship of Hrit s a , particularly in China. In my mind there are a number of problems with the identic ation of all the images of the tutelary pair in Gandhra as Hrit and Pancika. As a a e Pri notes, there are other demon mothers and evidence for a cult devoted exclusively to Hrit is scant. I hope to study this issue more fully. a 8 I have written on the sacrice of the body in Granoff, 1990. The question of Buddhist attitudes towards traditional Brhamanical forms of religious practice is obviously a complicated one. In these stories the Buddha in a past birth is often the exemplary pious practitioner of a form of religious practice we associate with orthodox Brahmanism; he performs sacrices and makes gifts to Brahmins. At least in these stories there is no effort to use ritual boundaries as exclusive markers. The merit the future Buddha gains from the practice of these typically Brahmanical rituals assists him in his quest for perfect enlightenment. 9 a See the Sodasaslok of Dharmasgara and Sr Jnnasundar Mahrja, Kharataraa aa . matotpatti nos 2225, which shows that the writing of such polemics has not abated. 10 Apabhramsakavyatravy. I have translated portions of these texts in my essay in Granoff (1992). 11 It is not entirely clear to me what ritual is under discussion. I have assumed that the garlanding refers to the garlanding of the image and not of the devotee, as it takes place for example during the uvahna tapas as described in the Vidhimargaprapa of a Jinaprabhasuri. 12 The passage is 5.134 in the edition with commentary of Abhayadevasu ri. The last phrase in my edition reads vipakka-tapo-bambhacernam devnam vannnam a. . a. . . .. . vadamne which is glossed as vipakva-tapo-brahmac rynm devnm varnam vadan a. a a.a . a a. . . praising those who have become gods through the fruits of their austerities and religions restraints. The actual example of praising the gods is given, p. 215, as: devna aho s . visayavisamohiyvi jinabhavane / accharashim pi samam hsi a. lam a a . . . . a a jena na karimti . . See how steadfast are the gods in their vow of chasity; though tempted by the objects of the senses, they do not toy with the heavenly damsels in the Jinas temple! The passage is not without problems; however, I believe that its explicit mention of the two rituals pratisth and d . may well give us some clue as to the context ksa . a for Balllasenas text. a 14 See the comments of Hans Bakker in the Prolegomena to his edition of the
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. Skandapurana (1998). This text is different from and considerably earlier than the . Skandapurana that has been published many times before. 15 . See for example Ymunas Agamapramanya. a 16 jalaynm dnni tath ca suravemnm/ noktni dnni samyaguktni as a a . a a a s a a a a a a pratisthsgare yatah// vs 55 page 6. . . a a

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Dundas, Paul (1992). The Jains. London: Routledge. Granoff, Phyllis (1990). The Sacrice of Manicuda: The Context of Narrative Action . . . as a Guide to Interpretation, in V.N. Jha (ed.), Kalyanamtira (Festschrift for H. Nakamura), pp. 225239. Poona: Poona University Press. Granoff, Phyllis (1992). With Koichi Shinohara. Speaking of Monks. Oakville: Mosaic Press. Granoff, Phyllis (1994). Being in the Minority: Medieval Jain Reactions to Other Religious Groups, in N.N. Bhattacharyya (ed.), Jainsim and Prakrit in Ancient and Medieval India, Essays for Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jain, pp. 241267. Delhi: Manohar. Granoff, Phyllis (1998). The Forest of Thieves and the Magic Garden: An Anthology of Medieval Jain Stories. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Granoff, Phyllis (1998a). Cures and Karma: Healing and being Healed in Jain Religious Literature, in A. Baumgarten et al. (eds.), Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience, pp. 218256. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Granoff, Phyllis (1998b). Cures and Karma II: Some Miraculous Healings in the Indian Buddhist Story Tradition, Bulletin de lEcole Francaise dExtreme Orient 85: 285305. Granoff, Phyllis (2000). Other Peoples Rituals: Ritual Eclecticism in Early Medieval Indian Religions, Journal of Indian Philosophy 28(4): 399424. Pri, Noel (1918). Hrit la M`re des Dmons, Bulletin de lEcole Francaise e a e e dExtreme Orient XVIII: 1102. Wujastyk, Dominik (1998). The Roots of Ayurveda. Delhi: Penguin.

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