Pūrṇabhadra’s Pañcatantra: Jaina Tales Or Brahmanical Outsourcing?

For over a hundred years, it has been assumed that the collection of Sanskrit narrative fables known as Pūrṇabhadra’s Pañcatantra was a Jaina text. For the last thirty years or so, one could assume that because the redactor inhabited a specific epistemic community, the Jaina ‘thought-world’, that th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Taylor, McComas 1956- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: [publisher not identified] 2011
In: International Journal of Jaina Studies
Year: 2011, Volume: 7, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-17
Online Access: Volltext (kostenfrei)
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Summary:For over a hundred years, it has been assumed that the collection of Sanskrit narrative fables known as Pūrṇabhadra’s Pañcatantra was a Jaina text. For the last thirty years or so, one could assume that because the redactor inhabited a specific epistemic community, the Jaina ‘thought-world’, that this was not only obvious, but inevitable. This paper challenges both these assumptions, and will set out to demonstrate that the Pūrṇabhadra’s Pañcatantra is a product of a Brahminical, Hindu, episteme, and that the redactor, rather than being a trapped in the imaginary of Jaina society draw on the epistemic traditions of his choice. This will contribute to our understanding of pre-modern literary production, the Jaina thought-world and the workings of epistemic communities more generally. This article demonstrates that a Jaina is capable of producing a non-Jaina text. This might seem obvious, but it challenges our assumptions about the production of discourse in a given epistemic community.
ISSN:1748-1074
Contains:Enthalten in: International Journal of Jaina Studies