- Length
- 336 pagesTatia, That Which Is, HarperCollins, 1994 - with commentary
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Tattvarthasutra
The first Jain work written in Sanskrit rather than a vernacular, and the only text both major Jain traditions accept - which makes it the closest thing the religion has to a creed, produced by a philosopher rather than a council. It is also the fullest statement anywhere of a metaphysics in which moral consequence is a physical substance.
- Date
- c. 200-400
- Attributed to
- Umasvati
- Region
- India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 1906 German, Hermann Jacobi The beginning of European study of the text Attested
- 1920 English, J. L. Jaini Digambara recension; public domain Consensus
- 1994 English, Nathmal Tatia That Which Is; the standard modern version, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Opens — Starts a line of argument nothing before it was answering
- Form
- Sutra
- Method
- Sutra and commentary — A compressed root text carried by its commentary
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
The one text accepted as authoritative by both major Jain traditions, which agree on almost nothing else about their canon.
What the book says
About three hundred and fifty aphorisms in ten chapters, setting out the whole of Jain doctrine in order. It opens by stating that liberation is reached by right insight, right knowledge and right conduct together, and then works through what there is to know. There are two fundamental kinds of thing: souls, which are conscious, and non-souls, which are not - matter, motion, rest, space and time. Every living thing has a soul, and the text grades them by the number of senses they possess, from beings with only touch upward. Knowledge comes in five kinds, of which the ordinary two are indirect and the higher three are direct. The middle chapters describe the universe and the destinies within it in careful detail. Then comes the doctrinal core: karma is not a moral bookkeeping but a subtle physical substance that flows into the soul and adheres to it, weighing it down and determining its condition. The practical chapters follow from that - how the inflow is stopped, how existing karma is shed by austerity, and what conduct the vows require, with separate accounts for householders and for monks. The last chapter describes the liberated soul, which rises to the top of the universe and stays there.
What it argues
That the universe contains souls and non-souls and nothing else, that souls are naturally omniscient and blissful, and that their condition is explained by a material accretion. Karma here is not a law or a tendency but fine particulate matter, drawn to the soul by activity and passion, sticking to it, and obscuring its natural capacities the way dirt obscures a crystal. This makes the whole ethical programme physical: the vows exist to stop the inflow, austerity exists to shed what has already adhered, and liberation is what a soul does by itself once nothing is weighing it down. Non-violence follows directly rather than as a commandment, since every act of harm involves the passion that binds.
How it argues
By definition and division, in the compressed sutra form, with the argument carried entirely by the commentaries. The text itself asserts a structure and enumerates its parts; it does not defend the structure against rivals. What defends it is the Jain doctrine of many-sidedness, developed at length elsewhere in the tradition, which holds that reality is complex enough that every one-sided assertion is partly true and partly false - a position that lets Jain philosophers accept the partial validity of opposing schools rather than refute them.
The moment
Written for a community whose scriptures were in Prakrit and were in the process of splitting into two traditions that could not agree on which of them survived. Composing in Sanskrit was a deliberate move into the language of inter-school philosophical debate, where Nyaya, Buddhist and Vedanta thinkers were arguing, and the effect was to make Jain doctrine arguable in the terms everyone else was using. That the result was accepted by both sects is a historical accident of timing as much as an achievement.
How it travelled
Within the Jain community, continuously and in two versions. Both traditions produced major commentaries - Pujyapada, Akalanka and Vidyanandi on the Digambara side, Siddhasena and the author's own commentary on the Svetambara - and the text has been memorised and taught without interruption for something like eighteen centuries. Outside Jainism it travelled hardly at all until European scholarship arrived: Jacobi's work at the turn of the twentieth century was the beginning of serious study, and Jain philosophy remains substantially less known in the West than Hindu or Buddhist thought despite being of comparable age and sophistication.
The strongest objection
That making karma physical solves one problem by creating a harder one. It gives a mechanism where other systems have only a moral principle, which is a real gain in explanatory tidiness - but it requires a kind of matter nobody can detect, adhering to a soul that is not itself material, by an interaction the text does not describe. The Jain answer is that the soul has a subtle body that mediates the contact, which relocates the difficulty rather than resolving it. The system pays in physics for what it gains in ethics.
Why read it
Because it is the most complete short statement of a major philosophy that most educated readers have never encountered, and because the physical account of karma is genuinely strange and genuinely worked out. Read the Tatia edition, which prints the sutras with enough commentary to make them intelligible without burying them.
- First printed
- 1903
- First in English
- 1920
- Digitised
- Partial
Two recensions exist, Digambara and Svetambara, differing in the wording of a number of sutras and in the total count. Each tradition has its own commentarial line, and the differences are doctrinally significant rather than cosmetic.
Jacobi's German of 1906 and the older English versions are public domain. Nathmal Tatia's 1994 English is in copyright and is the standard.
Where it stands
Live as a religious text and increasingly present in academic philosophy, where the Jain doctrine of many-sidedness has attracted attention from logicians interested in non-classical treatments of contradiction and perspective.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain; the readable English is in copyright, and the two recensions differ in wording, so any quotation would need to specify which. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The author's name is given as Umasvati in one tradition and Umasvami in the other, and each claims him. Whether the accompanying commentary is his own is disputed and affects how the sutras are read. The two recensions differ in the wording of numerous sutras and in the total number, and some of those differences carry doctrinal weight - notably on whether a woman can attain liberation, which the two traditions answer differently. The date is unfixable within about three centuries.