As will have been noticed, two of the three modes of birth found in Jainism include three of the four modes of birth taught in the Book of Dzyan. That is, the Jaina embryo-born (garbha-ja) includes the egg-born and the womb-born, and the Jaina upapāta or upapāda is equivalent to the self-born. Only the sweat-born of the Book of Dzyan is not accounted for. So could the remaining mode of birth found in Jainism include the sweat-born? This is the sammūrchana or sammūrcchima, the mode of birth by agglutination, which includes the strange type of human being who is not born from a womb or embryo. Let us try to find out.
In seeking information on the teachings found in Jainism, one first turns to the Tatthvārthādhigama-sūtra, which has aptly been called the “Jaina Bible.” It is the standard compendium of Jaina teachings, accepted by both of the two main branches of Jainism, Śvetāmbara and Digambara. Its chapter 2, verse 31 (Digambara recension) or verse 32 (Śvetāmbara recension) has given us the three modes of birth found in Jainism. Being a sūtra text, it merely lists them, without elaboration. For elaboration, one must turn to the commentaries on this text. Before doing this, however, we must note a direct mention of the sweat-born in the Jaina canon.
The Sūtrakṛtāṅga is one of the eleven or twelve Aṅgas that form the primary texts of the Jaina canon. It is accepted in its extant form as being authentic by the Śvetāmbara Jainas. In part one, section 7, verse 1, we find four modes of birth stated. This book is in Prakrit. I here give them in their Sanskrit form as found in Śilāṅka’s Sanskrit commentary thereon (Āgama Suttāṇi ed., vol. 2, p. 166): aṇḍaja, “egg-born”; jarāyuja, “womb-born”; saṃsvedaja, “sweat-born”; and rasaja, “fluid-born.” This text is one of the comparatively few Jaina scriptures that have been translated into English. It was done by Hermann Jacobi and published in 1895 as Gaina Sūtras, Part II, in the Sacred Books of the East Series, Vol. 45.
Even when we have English translations of Eastern texts, they cannot be relied on for doing Book of Dzyan research. Jacobi has translated saṃsvedaja as “those generated from dirt” (p. 292). So a search for the sweat-born would not find it, even though it is there in the original. These four modes of birth are in this text just mentioned in passing. This group did not become the standard teaching in Jainism, as we see from the Tatthvārthādhigama-sūtra.
We now turn to the commentaries on the Tatthvārthādhigama-sūtra to seek an elaboration of the sammūrchana or agglutination type of birth. In 1994 an English translation of this text was published, titled, That Which Is: Tattvārtha Sūtra, with the Combined Commentaries of Umāsvāti/Umāsvāmi, Pūjyapāda and Siddhasenagaṇi. The subtitle sounds promising for English access to the commentaries, and the translator, Nathmal Tatia, is one of the most learned Jaina scholars writing in English today. However, as comparison with the commentaries will show, the subtitle is misleading. This book gives only a comparatively few selected items from them. It is nonetheless a very good place to start. In fact, its commentary on 2.36/35 gives us some rather startling information about the sammūrchana type of birth in its specific relation to humans:
“The humans born of agglutination originate in human excreta such as faeces, urine, sputum, mucus, vomit, bile, pus, blood, semen, etc.”
While none of these are sweat, they are like sweat in that they all share the common characteristic of being something that the body excretes. This is an intriguing find. It is all the more potentially significant for Book of Dzyan research in that it comes from a very old source. But more on that shortly. We now hasten to check the full commentaries to see what else they may tell us about these strange examples. Of the three commentaries used by Nathmal Tatia, the commentary by Umāsvāti or Umāsvāmi, author of the Tatthvārtha-sūtra, is the primary Śvetāmbara commentary. It has no mention of these, and does not even mention humans born by sammūrchana or agglutination. Next we check the primary Digambara commentary, Pūjyapāda’s Sarvārtha-siddhi. It, too, has no mention of these or of humans born by sammūrchana. We now check a longer Digambara commentary, Akalaṅka’s Rāja-vārtika. Nothing there either. When we check the Śvetāmbara sub-commentary by Siddhasenagaṇi we find the first mention of humans as included in birth by sammūrchana or agglutination, but still nothing about the strange examples of their birth in human excreta given by Nathmal Tatia. So where did he get these from?
Further search led me to the Prajñāpanā, an Upāṅga of the Jaina canon. It is written in Prakrit, which made finding the relevant paragraph in it difficult. There are Hindi translations, but no English translation. At last I found it, the source for these examples, paragraph 93 of the first chapter in the Jaina-Āgama-Series edition (Bombay, 1969, p. 35). Now I could check the Sanskrit commentary by Malayagiri. For this I used the Āgama Suttāṇi edition, where rather than 93 it is paragraph 166 (Ahmedabad, 2000, vol. 10, pp. 56-57). To my dismay, Malayagiri did not explain this paragraph.
The 1969 Prakrit edition of the Prajñāpanā had cited Malayagiri’s commentary on the Nandī-sūtra for a reading in this paragraph. Hoping that he explained it there, I started going through this Sanskrit commentary to find it. It is found in his commentary on paragraph 81 of the Nandī-sūtra in the Āgama Suttāṇi edition, at the beginning of the section on manaḥ-paryāya jñāna (vol. 30, pp. 98-99). Again, Malayagiri did not gloss this Prakrit paragraph in his Sanskrit commentary. He had only quoted it in Prakrit from the Prajñāpanā.
At this point I would have been stuck, knowing only Sanskrit and not Prakrit. But to the rescue came the complete word index in the excellent Jaina-Āgama-Series edition of the Prajñāpanā (published under its Prakrit title, Paṇṇavaṇāsuttaṁ), which provided full Sanskrit equivalents for each Prakrit word. From these I was able to construct, word by word, a Sanskrit equivalent of this Prakrit paragraph. From this I will give an English translation of this unusual material. In the meantime, full data on the Jaina texts here referred to can be found in this Bibliographic Guide on The Jaina Scriptures: http://www.easterntradition.org/etri%20bib-jaina%20scriptures.pdf. Without these valuable Prakrit and Sanskrit editions, English translations of some texts such as the Tatthvārthādhigama-sūtra (see pp. 10, 12), and the massive encyclopedic reference work in Prakrit and Sanskrit, Abhidhāna-Rājendra-Koṣa, this research would not have been possible.