Jain Sutras

Context

One of the earliest of the Jain Sutras, the Acaranga Sutra was compiled by unknown authors who based their text on the teachings of Mahavira, a Jain saint who had died several generations before, in 527 BCE. Jainism had long been present in India when Mahavira was born. But the age in which he lived, the middle of the first millennium BCE, saw sweeping religious, social, economic, and political changes that transformed Indian culture.

About a thousand years before Mahavira, around 1500 BCE, a group of nomadic cattle herders migrated into northwestern India from Central Asia, bringing with them a body of orally transmitted texts called the Vedas and a religion based on the regular performance of sacrifice. As the religion of the Vedas took hold, there arose a priestly class responsible for transmitting the sacred texts and performing the elaborate rituals they contained. This class, called the Brahmins, was at the top of a hereditary four-tier caste system that was ranked according to access to the all-important sacrifice. Below the Brahmins were the class of warriors and kings, then the class of farmers and craftsmen, and finally slaves. The Brahmins, whose religion is the basis of the Hindu tradition, worshipped a pantheon of deities related to the gods of ancient Greece and Scandinavia and held the Vedas up as the absolute authority on everything. Their knowledge of the texts and their exclusive right to perform the sacrifices kept the Brahmins in a position of privilege.

By the fifth century BCE the Brahmins had composed a vast body of commentary, called the Upanishads, about the secret meaning of the Vedas. Some of the Brahmins renounced the world and retreated into the wilderness to transmit their esoteric knowledge to students. They also began to see meditation and intense asceticism as ways to internalize sacrifice and gain great philosophical insights. Out of this movement of forest dwellers, the great traditions of Buddhism and Jainism were born. Mahavira and Siddhartha Gautama, the two most important figures in Jainism and Buddhism, respectfully, were born not into the Brahmin class but into the warrior class. Unlike the Brahmins, Buddhists and Jains rejected the sacrifice and the authority of the Vedas.

The Brahmins had thrived when Indian society was organized into small tribal chiefdoms, such that there were plenty of local rulers to support them. But when the great empires, especially the Maurya Empire, founded in 322 BCE, supplanted the authority of local rulers, the Brahmins began to lose their patronage. The ideas of Buddhism and Jainism, which appealed to non-Brahmins because they rejected the Brahmins’ hierarchy, quickly spread throughout the subcontinent via merchants, who could travel freely because of the political stability created by the empires. The Acaranga Sutra came out of this period of sweeping change, offering a new worldview that declared the futility of the material power coveted by the Brahmins and outlined a new path to liberation based on asceticism and nonviolence.