Phyllis Granoff: "On Reading the Lives of the Jinas: Questions and Answers of Medieval Monks"
Abstract:
The lives of the Tīrthaṅkaras, from their modest beginnings in early texts, developed into rich and complicated narratives. Jains embedded the past lives of the Jinas into the biography of the final life, building an often baroque composition to which were also attached numerous didactic stories. The biographies of the Jinas were told in every language and in every conceivable genre of literature, in every part of the subcontinent where there were Jains, and throughout the ages.
It is no surprise that different tellings sometimes had different details. What was the status of these texts within the larger corpus of Jain literature? Were readers/hearers of these texts aware of the conflicts between them? And if so, what did they do about the inconsistencies from text to text? This paper seeks to answer these questions based on a series of exchanges between learned monks of the 17th century that were meticulously recorded and have been preserved. It will propose that Jain monks regarded all the different biographies as authoritative texts, exact records of the past, that could even be called upon to legitimate present (and innovative) new practices.
Speaker's Bio:
Phyllis Granoff is the Lex Hixon Professor of World Religions in the Department of Religious Studies, Yale University. A graduate of Harvard, she taught for many years at McMaster University and has held visiting appointments at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, UC Berkekey, and Harvard.
A specialist in Indian religions, Professor Granoff is the author of numerous publications covering a wide range of topics in Indian religion, literature, and art. In collaboration with Koichi Shinohara, she has produced a series of important works on Asian religions, including Monks and Magicians, Religious Biography in Asia (1988); Speaking of Monks: Religious Biography in Asia (1992); Other Selves: Autobiography and Biography in Cross-cultural Perspective (1994); Pilgrims, Patrons and Place, Localizing Sanctity in Asian Religions (2003); and Images in Asian Religions: Texts and Contexts (2004).