The Kalpa Sutra Manuscripts: Fourteen Dreams in Gold

Each year at the end of summer, during the eight-day festival of Paryushana, Shvetambara Jain monks in western India read aloud from a book that the community holds among its most sacred: the Kalpa Sutra. On the fifth day the reading reaches the birth of Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Jina. Before his birth his mother, Queen Trishala, dreamed fourteen dreams, and in temples silver replicas of the dreams are shown to the congregation and families make offerings to honour them. For centuries the book was copied by hand and illustrated, in brilliant red, blue and gold, and gifting a copy to a temple library was an act of religious merit.

The text

• Tradition attributes it to the teacher Bhadrabahu, traditionally of the fourth century BCE; the text was fixed, with the rest of the Shvetambara canon, at the Council of Valabhi in the fifth century CE.
• Three parts: the lives of the Jinas (above all Mahavira, then Parshva, Nemi and Rishabha); a list of the elders who handed on the teaching; and rules for monks during the rainy-season retreat.
• The Kalpa Sutra is a Shvetambara text. The Digambara Jains do not accept it, and their tradition counts sixteen dreams, not fourteen.

The manuscripts

• The oldest copies are on palm leaf. From the late fourteenth century Jain scribes in Gujarat and Rajasthan began to use paper, and the number of illustrated copies grew rapidly.
• The pages are long and narrow, imitating palm leaves, often with a painted dot or hole where a string once passed through.
• The paintings are in the Western Indian style: flat red grounds, figures in profile with a projecting far eye, and lavish use of gold and ultramarine. Wealthy merchants commissioned them.
• Thousands survive in the temple libraries, the bhandars, and in museums worldwide.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The fourteen dreams. An elephant, a bull, a lion, the goddess Shri, a garland, the moon, the sun, a banner, a vase, a lotus lake, the ocean, a celestial palace, a heap of jewels and a smokeless fire. Interpreters told the king that they announced the birth of a universal ruler or a Jina. The interactive cards above show all fourteen.

The transfer of the embryo. In the Kalpa Sutra, Mahavira was first conceived by a Brahmin woman, Devananda, and the god Harinaigamesin moved the embryo to the womb of the Kshatriya queen Trishala. The episode is often painted. The Digambaras reject it.

Books as objects of worship. Jains honour knowledge as sacred: on the festival of Jnana Panchami manuscripts are cleaned and venerated. Copying and donating books earned merit, which is why so many were made and preserved.

Connections

Jainism (ch52). Compare the Diamond Sutra (V30) for a Buddhist book, and the Book of Kells (V21) for another tradition of sacred illumination.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/kalpa-sutra-manuscripts.html