{"id":130,"date":"2012-02-14T04:51:48","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T03:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/?p=130"},"modified":"2012-02-15T07:00:13","modified_gmt":"2012-02-15T06:00:13","slug":"modes-of-birth-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/modes-of-birth-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Modes of Birth, part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
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 upap\u0101ta or upap\u0101da is equivalent to the self-born. Only the sweat-born of the Book of Dzyan <\/span>is not accounted for. So could the remaining mode of birth found in Jainism include the sweat-born? This is the samm\u016brchana or samm\u016brcchima, the mode of birth\u00a0by agglutination, which includes the strange type of human being\u00a0who is\u00a0not born from a womb or embryo. Let us try to find out.<\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In seeking information on the teachings found in Jainism, one first turns to the Tatthv\u0101rth\u0101dhigama-s\u016btra<\/em>, 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, \u015avet\u0101mbara and Digambara. Its chapter 2, verse 31 (Digambara recension) or verse 32 (\u015avet\u0101mbara recension) has given us the three modes of birth found in Jainism. Being a s\u016btra 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\u00a0of the sweat-born in the Jaina canon.<\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The S\u016btrak\u1e5bt\u0101\u1e45ga<\/em> is\u00a0one of the eleven or\u00a0twelve A\u1e45gas that form the\u00a0primary texts of the Jaina canon. It is accepted in its extant form\u00a0as being authentic by the \u015avet\u0101mbara Jainas. In\u00a0part one,\u00a0section 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 \u015ail\u0101\u1e45ka’s Sanskrit commentary thereon (\u0100gama Sutt\u0101\u1e47i ed., vol. 2, p. 166):\u00a0a\u1e47\u1e0daja, “egg-born”; jar\u0101yuja, “womb-born”; sa\u1e43svedaja, “sweat-born”; and rasaja, “fluid-born.”\u00a0This text is one of the comparatively few Jaina scriptures that have been\u00a0translated into English. It\u00a0was done\u00a0by Hermann Jacobi and published in 1895 as Gaina S\u016btras<\/em>, Part II,\u00a0in the Sacred Books of the East Series, Vol. 45. <\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Even when we have English translations of Eastern texts, they cannot be relied on for doing Book of Dzyan research. Jacobi has translated sa\u1e43svedaja 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\u00a0in this text just mentioned in passing. This group did not become the standard teaching in Jainism, as we see from the Tatthv\u0101rth\u0101dhigama-s\u016btra<\/em>.<\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

We now turn to the commentaries on the Tatthv\u0101rth\u0101dhigama-s\u016btra<\/em>\u00a0to seek\u00a0an elaboration of the samm\u016brchana or agglutination type of birth. In 1994 an English translation\u00a0of this text was published, titled, That Which Is: Tattv\u0101rtha S\u016btra, with the Combined Commentaries of Um\u0101sv\u0101ti\/Um\u0101sv\u0101mi, P\u016bjyap\u0101da and Siddhasenaga\u1e47i<\/em>. 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.\u00a0This\u00a0book\u00a0gives only a comparatively few selected items from them.\u00a0It is nonetheless a very good place to start. In fact, its commentary on 2.36\/35 gives us some rather startling information about the samm\u016brchana type of birth in its specific relation to humans: <\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

“The humans born of agglutination originate in human excreta such as faeces, urine, sputum, mucus, vomit, bile, pus, blood, semen, etc.”<\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

While none of these are sweat, they are like sweat in that they all share the common characteristic of being something that the\u00a0body 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 Um\u0101sv\u0101ti or Um\u0101sv\u0101mi, author of the Tatthv\u0101rtha-s\u016btra<\/em>, is the primary \u015avet\u0101mbara commentary. It has no mention of these, and does not even mention humans born by samm\u016brchana or agglutination. Next we check the primary Digambara commentary, P\u016bjyap\u0101da’s Sarv\u0101rtha-siddhi<\/em>. It, too, has no mention of these or of humans born by samm\u016brchana. We now check a longer Digambara commentary, Akala\u1e45ka’s R\u0101ja-v\u0101rtika<\/em>. Nothing there either. When\u00a0we check the \u015avet\u0101mbara sub-commentary by Siddhasenaga\u1e47i we find the first mention of humans as included in birth by samm\u016brchana or agglutination, but still nothing about the strange examples of their birth in human excreta given by Nathmal Tatia. So where did\u00a0he get these from?<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n


<\/p>\n

Further search led me to the Praj\u00f1\u0101pan\u0101<\/em>, an Up\u0101\u1e45ga of the Jaina canon. It is written in Prakrit, which made finding the relevant paragraph\u00a0in it difficult. There are Hindi translations, but no English translation. At last I found it,\u00a0the source for these examples,\u00a0paragraph 93 of the first chapter in the Jaina-\u0100gama-Series edition (Bombay, 1969, p. 35). Now I could check the Sanskrit commentary by Malayagiri. For this I used the \u0100gama Sutt\u0101\u1e47i edition, where rather than 93\u00a0it is paragraph 166 (Ahmedabad, 2000, vol. 10, pp. 56-57). To my dismay, Malayagiri did not explain this paragraph. <\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The 1969 Prakrit edition of the\u00a0Praj\u00f1\u0101pan\u0101<\/em> had cited Malayagiri’s commentary on the Nand\u012b-s\u016btra<\/em> for a\u00a0reading 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\u00a0Nand\u012b-s\u016btra<\/em>\u00a0in the \u0100gama Sutt\u0101\u1e47i edition, at the beginning of the section on mana\u1e25-pary\u0101ya j\u00f1\u0101na (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 Praj\u00f1\u0101pan\u0101<\/em>. <\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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-\u0100gama-Series edition of the Praj\u00f1\u0101pan\u0101<\/em> (published under its Prakrit title, Pa\u1e47\u1e47ava\u1e47\u0101sutta\u1e41<\/em>), which\u00a0provided full\u00a0Sanskrit equivalents for each Prakrit word. From these I was able to\u00a0construct, word by word,\u00a0a 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\u00a0Bibliographic Guide on The Jaina Scriptures: http:\/\/www.easterntradition.org\/etri%20bib-jaina%20scriptures.pdf<\/a>. Without these valuable Prakrit and Sanskrit editions, English translations of some texts such as the\u00a0Tatthv\u0101rth\u0101dhigama-s\u016btra<\/em> (see pp. 10, 12), and the massive encyclopedic reference work in Prakrit and Sanskrit, Abhidh\u0101na-R\u0101jendra-Ko\u1e63a<\/em>, this research would not have been possible.<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 upap\u0101ta or upap\u0101da is equivalent to the self-born. Only the sweat-born […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropogenesis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prajnaquest.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}