Shatkhandagama

01A cave on Girnar

Digambara tradition tells it this way. Acharya Dharasena, living in the Chandra Gupha on Girnar, held part of the old Purva knowledge and saw that it would die with him. He sent word to the monks gathered at Mahima in the south, and two able monks came. He tested them with two vidyas, each with a syllable wrong. They found and fixed the errors, and he knew they were fit. He taught them what he knew, and gave them the names by which they are remembered, Pushpadanta and Bhutabali.

02Shruta Panchami

Pushpadanta began the work and wrote the first 177 sutras, the Satprarupana. Bhutabali completed the rest, some six thousand sutras in all, in the Shauraseni Prakrit of the Digambara scriptures. On Jyeshtha Shukla Panchami the finished scripture was worshipped by the sangha. That day is Shruta Panchami. Digambara Jains still bring out their manuscripts on it, dust and wrap them in fresh cloth, and offer them puja with rice, flowers and lamps. For them it marks the day the Jina’s word was first fixed in writing.

03Fragment of a lost Purva

Digambaras hold that the Shatkhandagama preserves part of the Agrayaniya, the second of the fourteen Purvas that made up the lost twelfth Anga. That is why it carries the honour of Agama for them, and why the sangha says the sutras are the words of the Jina passed down through the acharyas. Alongside it stands the Kashayapahuda of Acharya Gunadhara, drawn from the fifth Purva. Together they are called the Siddhanta, the settled doctrine, and for centuries only senior monks were permitted to study them.

04How it begins

The first sutra is the Namokar Mantra itself, the bow to the five supreme beings. Virasena’s commentary credits Pushpadanta with placing it there as the mangala and discusses at length why a sutra text needs an auspicious opening at all. The second sutra announces the plan: to search out the fourteen stages of the soul, fourteen marganas, ways of inquiry, must be known. The fourth names them: destiny, senses, body, activity, gender, passion, knowledge, restraint, perception, leshya, capacity for liberation, right faith, having a mind, and taking nourishment.

05Karma, measured

This is a technical book, and Jains treasure it for that. Its six parts deal with the soul’s fourteen gunasthanas on the path, the lesser bondage, who binds which karma, the experience of karma as it ripens, the classes of matter that become karma, and finally the great Mahabandha, a full analysis of bondage by type, duration, intensity and quantity. The text works through tables of numbers. How many beings stand at each stage, for how long, in how much space. Its mathematics of the infinite has drawn the interest of historians of Indian mathematics.

06Dhavala, Jayadhavala, Mahadhavala

Acharya Virasena wrote the Dhavala commentary on the first five parts in a mix of Prakrit and Sanskrit, about 72,000 shlokas in length, completed in 816 CE by its own colophon. He began the Jayadhavala on the Kashayapahuda, and his disciple Jinasena finished it in 837 CE, in the reign of the Rashtrakuta king Amoghavarsha. The Mahadhavala covers the sixth part. The three are called the Dhavala texts, the bright ones, and they remain the deepest study of karma in the Jain tradition.

07Saved at Moodbidri

For centuries the only copies were palm-leaf manuscripts in old Kannada script kept at the Siddhanta Basadi of Moodbidri in Tulu Nadu, worshipped and seldom opened. Pilgrims came to have darshan of the books, not to read them. In the early 20th century, after long persuasion, the bhattaraka and the community allowed copies to be made. Between 1939 and 1958 Hiralal Jain published the Shatkhandagama with the Dhavala and a Hindi translation in sixteen volumes from Amravati, and the Mahabandha followed. A text kept alive by one temple’s care reached every Jain library.

08Studied today

Digambara munis and aryikas still teach the Shatkhandagama in long study camps, often through the Dhavala, and scholars at Jain institutes in Sagar, Varanasi and Jabalpur read it line by line. Most lay Jains will never open its tables of karma. They know it instead through Shruta Panchami, through the Namokar Mantra that begins it, and through the gunasthana ladder that every Jain child learns, fourteen rungs from wrong belief to the soul that has shed all karma.

What it contains

1. 1
   Jivasthana जीवट्ठाण

   The first and largest part, by Pushpadanta and Bhutabali, in eight anuyogadvaras beginning with the Satprarupana. It examines the fourteen gunasthanas through the fourteen marganas and closes with appendices on how right faith arises.

2. 2
   Kshudrakabandha खुद्दाबंध

   The lesser treatise on bondage. It examines which beings, in which marganas, bind karma, more briefly than the Mahabandha.

3. 3
   Bandhasvamitvavichaya बंधसामित्तविचय

   Which beings bind which kinds of karma, stage by stage. It is the ownership of bondage: who is the binder of each karma and where that binding stops.

4. 4
   Vedana वेयणा

   The experience of karma as it ripens. It opens with a second mangala, a long litany of bows to the jinas and the masters of each kind of knowledge and power.

5. 5
   Vargana वग्गणा

   The classes of matter in the universe, and which of them can become karma. It also treats touch, action and the other categories the text calls anuyogadvaras.

6. 6
   Mahabandha महाबंध

   The great treatise on bondage, by Bhutabali, the longest analysis of how karma binds by type, duration, intensity and quantity. Its commentary is called the Mahadhavala.

Famous verses

णमो अरिहंताणं, णमो सिद्धाणं, णमो आइरियाणं। णमो उवज्झायाणं, णमो लोए सव्व-साहूणं॥

I bow to the Arihantas, to the Siddhas, to the Acharyas, to the Upadhyayas, and to all the sadhus in the world.Shatkhandagama 1.1.1 (Jivasthana, Satprarupana, sutra 1: the mangala)

एत्तो इमेसिं चोद्दसण्हं जीव-समासाणं मग्गणट्ठदाए तत्थ इमाणि चोद्दस चेव ट्ठाणाणि णायव्वाणि भवंति॥

From here, in order to search out these fourteen stages of souls, these fourteen headings of inquiry are to be known.Shatkhandagama 1.1.2

गइ इंदिए काए जोगे वेदे कसाए णाणे संजमे दंसणे लेस्सा भविय सम्मत्त सण्णि आहारए चेदि॥

Destiny, senses, body, activity, gender, passion, knowledge, restraint, perception, leshya, capacity for liberation, right faith, having a mind, and taking nourishment.Shatkhandagama 1.1.4