Pūrṇabhadra’s Pañcatantra: Jaina Tales Or Brahmanical Outsourcing?

International Journal of Jaina Studies
(Online) Vol. 7, No. 1 (2011) 1-17

Abstract

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Introduction

Jaiselmer is a fort-city on the old trade route that crossed the Thar desert in the far west of the state of Rajasthan. When Colonel James Tod visited Western India in the 1830s, he already knew by reputation of the Jaina community whom he called the "Oswals of Jessulmer" and their great library located beneath the Parisnath (Pārśvanātha) temple (Johnson 1992: 199). Georg Bühler, who visited Jaiselmer in 1873-74, found the Jaina library "smaller in extent than was formerly supposed", but of "great importance": "It contains a not inconsiderable number of very ancient manuscripts of classical Sanskrit poems and of books on Brahmanical Sastras, as well as some rare Jaina works.... Besides the great Bhaṇḍār, Jesalmer is rich in private Jaina libraries" (Johnson 1992: 204).

Long before Tod and Bühler's visits, Jaiselmer had accommodated a thriving Jaina community and was an important seat of learning. Highly literate with a unique respect for writing (Johnson 1993: 189, Flügel 2005: 1), the Jaina community in Jaiselmer, like others all over India, were responsible for a prodigious literary output which formed great libraries known as "knowledge warehouses" (Cort 1995: 77).

"Among the thousands of texts and hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in the Jain libraries of India, there are many narrative texts in all of the languages in which Jains have written. Some relate all or part of the Jain universal history: the lives of the twenty four Jinas of this era, as well as those of other heroes and exemplary people. Others are explicitly works of fiction, which tell complex, intertwined tales of kings, queens, merchants and monks. In part these tales were meant to entertain, as the audience could enjoy the adventures and exploits. In equal part, they were meant to edify, as the stories narrated key Jain virtues" (Cort 2009: 1).

One such tale of "kings, queens, merchants and monks" was produced in Jaiselmer by the Jaina scholar Pūrṇabhadra-sūri, in the year 1199 CE. At the behest of a certain minister by the name of Śrīsoma-mantrin, Pūrṇabhadra collated and edited several earlier, badly corrupted manuscripts of the famous collection of fables known as the Pancatantra in order to produce what we might call today a "clean copy". Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra went on to become one of the most widespread and influential versions of this wellknown cycle.

To what extent is Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra a Jaina text, that is, one of a corpus which "narrate key Jain virtues" as Cort suggests? I will test this proposition in this paper by examining the manner in which Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra dovetails into the narrative techniques of what we might call an orthodox Sanskrit brahminical tradition.

Approach

The conceptual approach of this article in based primarily on the epistemology of Nietzsche and Foucault. The basic idea is that truth does not operate in a vacuum, that every epistemic community has its own conventions as to what counts as true discourse, who is authorised to make statements that count as true, etc. The sum of the means of production, validation and dissemination of "true" discourse are what Foucault termed the "regime of truth". The larger project is to identify the "regime of truth" for a brahminical Sanskritic episteme. Put another way, how have the "master" texts of the Sanskrit archive managed to exert such an important discursive influence over the past two millennia. No one who has witnessed the role of the master texts in contemporary Indian society could deny that the epics, the purāṇas and narrative kathā literature (including the Pancatantra) have been and continue to be regarded as "true" today. Yet, few scholars are asking how these texts function as "true", or what gives them their power, authority and legitimacy as texts.

The only scholar to have looked at the question of the empowerment of text in a broader Hindu context is Sheldon Pollock in his paper, "The theory of practice and the practice of theory in Indian intellectual history". Here he identified a set of common features, including claims of cosmogonic origins, divine authorship, and vast scope, which serve to empower and valorize śāstric texts (Pollock 1985).

I originally applied this approach to Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra in my book, The Fall of the Indigo Jackal (Taylor 2007), and subsequently to various aspects of the Brahma-, Bhāgavata- and Śivapurāṇas (Taylor 2008a, 2008b, 2008c) in an attempt to demonstrate how these texts are created by discourse, and how they in turn serve to create discourse. In spite of serious efforts to engage with the question of Jaina discourse (Flügel 2009/2010), I know of no similar attempt to define a Jaina "regime of truth".

Having established the critical framework for this approach, I now will outline the text-critical work that has been done on Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra. The two gurus of Pancatantra studies, the German Johannes Hertel (1872–1955) and the American, Franklin Edgerton (1885–1963) agreed that there must have been a single, original Pancatantra, an "Ur-text", and they also agreed on the membership of the major textual families, but they disagreed on almost everything else: which of the textual traditions had primacy, which was closer to the putative "original", and how the various branches related to one another. Hertel's favoured candidate was a north-western manuscript known as the Tantrākhyāyika, while Edgerton thought that the Southern textual tradition was closer in content and sentiment to the "original". The two competing textual lineages can be consulted in Hertel (1912: 5) and Edgerton (1924: 48). Their arcane and complex arguments were best summarised by Sternbach (1971: 30f.), and were carried on by Geib (1969) and Maten (1980-81).^[1]

While this philological tradition has provided later generations of scholars with clearly printed error-free "critical editions", the theoretical foundation on which this approach is based - the possibility and desirability of an Ur-text - has been undermined by contemporary critical theory. From the point of view of discourse, the so-called vulgate, that is, the most widespread, popular and often copied version of a text, is the one that exerts the greatest discursive impact on its audience, and therefore is of the most interest (Taylor 2007: 28-30).

There is little doubt that Pūrṇabhadra was a Jain. Firstly, the prologue of the Pancatantra refers to him as sūri, a title given specifically to teachers in that tradition. Secondly, there is the internal evidence from the text itself, which suggests that he was a member of the Śvetāmbara branch. Hertel argues that this must have been the case, "For no Digambara monk would have told the story I, xxii, in which the fraudulent monk burnt by the clever minister is a Digambara ascetic" (Hertel 1912: 26 n. 5).

Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra is the product of a specific literary and temporal context. In the late medieval period, Śvetāmbara Jains of western India produced an extensive literature encompassing narratives, chronicles and hagiographies in what has been called "Jaina Sanskrit", but what is in fact Sanskrit simply influenced by local vernaculars (Dundas 1996: 137). One of the striking features of Jain literature is the fact that is has been composed in a wide variety of languages, including Prākrits, Sanskrit, Apabhraṃśa, Hindi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada. Jaina authors exhibited an ambivalent attitude to Sanskrit, on the one hand seeking to distance themselves from it as it represents the language of the Other, the brahmin ritualists. On the other hand, it was embraced as the lingua franca of pre-modern Indian literary culture more broadly (Dundas 1996: 140, 156).

The Pañcatantra and the "regime of truth"

Since the time of Nietzsche, it has become increasingly difficult in western philosophy to justify the search for universal or ultimate Truth, and we have come to accept that what is true for us may not be true for someone else. We are increasingly unable to impose our truths on others, nor they on us. Rather than devoting academic ink to the search for Truth in texts, a more fruitful endeavour is to discover and reveal the ways in which statements apparently function as truth.

The purpose of this paper is to show how the Pancatantra, while redacted by a Jaina scholar, functions as "true" within the norms of the brahminical "episteme", to use a Foucauldian term. What lends veracity to the text? What gives it authority? Why has it been regarded as a source of good advice for so long? This is not to imply that the stories themselves need be inherently or historically true.^[2] One would have very good reason to doubt the existence of the frustrated king, Amaraśakti, his three foolish sons and the wise old Brahmin, Viṣṇuśarman, who narrated the stories of the Pancatantra cycle for their benefit. Of course the stories of talking lions and jackals, conspiring mice, and geese that shed golden feathers are not true in any literal sense. Yet imbedded within the narratives, shaping and informing them, is a set of normative discourses, familiar to anyone who knows the brahminical archive: the reality of the varṇa system (cāturvarṇya), the reality of the goals of human life (puruṣārtha), the authority of the Vedas, the laws of karma, the role of dharma. The question which concerns us here is this: what enables the normative discourses of the Pancatantra narratives to function as true?

These narratives have existed in written form for nearly two millennia, yet we know very little about how they were "performed". Who read them and in what contexts? The performance of the text undoubtedly exerts a truth effect: if one hears the text from one's guru's, svāmī's or ācārya's own lips, then of course it becomes the unquestionable truth. The performance of Sanskrit texts would be a worthwhile subject for investigation, but at present we have so little data from pre-modern times that for the purposes of this discussion we must set this problem aside. I will, however, endeavour to show how the text itself embodies certain characteristics and features that work as if subconsciously on the reader, particularly one steeped in the Sanskritic archive, that is, a reader who is a member of the text's historical audience, primarily a Sanskritic, Brahminical epistemic community.

My basic argument is that five features of the Pancatantra enable it to function as "true", that is, as credible, authoritative and effective for members of a Sanskritic, Brahminical thought-world. These features, explored originally in my book The Fall of the Indigo Jackal (Taylor 2007), are outlined below: the authoritative voice in which the text is enunciated, the way in which the discourse is universalised, the text's adherence to certain aspects of Pollock's "śāstric paradigm", intertextuality and the naturalization of the discourse.

1. Authoritative voice

The theoretical foundation for the concept of authoritative voice was laid by Bourdieu (1991) in his Language and Symbolic Power. Text enunciated by persons in positions of power entails variously coded markers and signs by which the enunciator's authority is subtly exerted.

"The stylistic features which characterize the language of priests, teachers and, more generally, all institutions, like routinization, stereotyping and neutralization, all stem from the position occupied in a competitive field by these persons entrusted with delegated authority" (Bourdieu 1991: 199).

Let us begin with a glance at the comparative authority of the written and spoken word. It is often said that the power of the Veda was inherent in the sound of recitation, and that Vedic civilisation was primarily an oral one. Yet besides the power of Vedic recitation, from the early medieval period onwards, throughout much of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, there was another source of power: the written word. During the entire period of 2000 years during which the Pancatantra texts have been current, only a small minority of the population could read or write. All the evidence suggests that only members of the powerful and privileged elite were literate. I would argue therefore that any written production was by its nature imbued with the power and authority of this social elite. Any written text was a product of power and certainly in the case of texts in the brahminical archive fed back into the maintenance of that power.

Further, throughout the life of the Pancatantra corpus, authors of written texts have had a number of languages to choose from: Sanskrit, various Prākrits and Apabhraṃśas, and a host of vernaculars. And yet, again and again throughout history and across the Sanskrit cosmopolis, authors made Sanskrit their language of choice. In fact, despite their ambivalence towards the language, Dundas (1997: 507) points to a "vast range of works composed by Jain monks in Sanskrit" in the medieval period. As Pollock observed, Sanskrit "represented the expression of the culturally dominant" (Pollock 2003: 42). For orthodox Hindu traditions, and even for some heterodox ones, Sanskrit was the only language that was ritually pure, and the whiff of sanctity and power was carried over into the mundane. Lest anyone doubt the continued discursive power of Sanskrit, the Maoist rebels in Nepal called for the outlawing of Sanskrit and bombed the Mahendra Sanskrit University in Dang District as recently as 2002.

There are multiple levels of authorship of the Pancatantra. Somewhere, sometime, someone created a narrative about the king, his three sons and the Brahmin. Someone also created the dozens of stories embedded in this narrative frame, but of course we cannot identify these individuals. Pūrṇabhadra edited the text into its current form in 1199 CE in Jaiselmer, and yet he is virtually absent from his own recension, and is mentioned by name only on the penultimate page of a 290-page document. He is a racitṛ (editor), rather than a lekhaka (author). What can we say about a text that has no identifiable author, one that is not attributable to a fallible human? I feel that if there is no visible author to refute, no identifiable human hand giving rise to the discourse, the text itself acquires a certain infallibility and irrefutability.

At another level of authorship, the whole Pancatantra story is ascribed to Viṣṇuśarman, the Brahmin into whose mouth the narratives are placed. We are told that he was eighty years old, and that he wrote the Pancatantra "having surveyed the cream of all the arthaśāstras of the world" (sakalārthaśāstrasāraṃ | jagati samālokya, PT 1.2). We are also told that Viṣṇuśarman had turned away from the objects of the senses and had no desire for wealth. He had been recommended to the king as a person who had achieved a reputation for his mastery over many śāstras ([a]nekaśāstrasaṃsiddhilabdhakīrtiḥ PT 1.24). He had a reputation worth maintaining: if he failed in his attempts to educate the princes, he undertook to renounce his own name (svanāmaparityāgaṃ karomi PT 2.5).

In this sense, the text is not anonymous, and if we are to accept this artifice, it is the product of Viṣṇuśarman: a wise, old, male, ascetic Brahmin. In the Sanskritic episteme these are all high-value, high-status attributes, and all of these contribute to the truth-effect of whatever discourse is placed in the mouth of such a person. If, therefore, we accept the fiction of Viṣṇuśarman as the "creator" of the text, we can perceive how the characteristics attributed to him may exert a truth effect on the discourse he is caused to articulate.

Turning now to the question of textual strategies, one aspect is the use of the passive voice, which is of course very common in all Sanskrit literature. A close examination here may reveal something of the way in which a text is read. The whole narrative of the Pancatantra is couched within the opening phrase: "This, as follows, was heard" (tad yathānuśrūyate PT 1.4). Over and over we are called to order by the use of the passive voice: "it is heard" (śrūyate), "it was said" (uktaṃ ca), and "it is well said" (sādhv idam ucyate), etc. The use of the passive voice has the discernable effect of removing the agency of both the hearer and the speaker: the thing is spoken and is heard, but by whom? It is uttered out of and into the eternal ether, as if freed from human volition. The passive voice lends distance and dispassion, and as with anonymity above, helps to render the text unimpeachable.

Let us pause to bring this all together - the power of the written word, Sanskrit as language-of-choice, the anonymity of the creator, the authority of the pseudo-creator of the text, and the use of textual strategies - all these contribute to the authoritative voice in which the text and the embedded discourses are enunciated.

2. Universalization

Let us now turn to the various ways in which the discourse of the Pancatantra is universalized. What the Pancatantra teaches does not appear to be restricted merely to one given place, time or audience. On the contrary, the text gives the clear impression that it is universally applicable in all three terms, to which we will now turn in order.

The framing narrative of the Pancatantra is set in a fictitious city called Mahilāropya, which is said to be in "the southern lands" (PT 1.4). Each of the five embedded tantras has its own spatial setting:

1. "Lion and bull": also in Mahilāropya

2. "Dove, mouse, crow, tortoise and deer": Pramadāropya

3. "Birds elect a king": Pṛthvīpratiṣṭhānam

4. "Monkey and crocodile": on the shores of an ocean

5. "Barber who killed the monks": Pāṭalīputra

The fictional cities of Pramadāropya and Pṛthvīpratiṣṭhānam are explicitly said to be "in southern lands". The setting of the third tantra is doubly exotic being both an ocean and being in the south. The setting for the fifth tantra, Pāṭalīputra, is problematic. If this is the well-known city on the Ganges, then it is properly in the north, but the text explicitly states that it too is in the south (PT 257.6: asti dākṣiṇātye janapade pāṭalīputraṃ nāma nagaram). Either there is a second (fictional?) city of the same name of which we are unaware, or the author's notion of what constitutes 'southern lands" is very different from what we might expect. Perhaps, as I will argue below, the author had a good reason for placing this city "in the southern lands", irrespective of its actual location.

Why are these narratives all set in the south? For a northern Indian audience - and Pūrṇabhadra's version and most of its predecessors were northern recensions - the south was a wild and unknown realm. It was the Other, outside and beyond Āryāvarta, where Brahmins might live peaceably and Vedic rituals might be conducted without let. The south, beyond the Vindhya mountains, seems to function as "a land far away" or the "distant kingdom" of European literature. There are nearly one hundred narrative units embedded in the larger frame story - hardly a single one has an identifiable geographical setting. The fictional nature of the narrative is brought to the fore, I contend, by placing it in either a fictional non-place or alternatively in the exotic literary setting of "the south". At the same time, the narrative's position within the genre of didactic normative texts is brought into play. I suggest that the audience is unconsciously primed to receive a certain sort of discourse for which the narrative is the vector. If discourse is true in a generalized literary setting - in this case, either literary non-place or in the distant lands of the south - how much truer the discourse seems when we encounter it in our own Āryavārta, as it were.

Turning from the creation and use of literary space, we will now consider the question of temporal universalisation in the form of generalized literary time. In relation to mythic time, Lévi-Strauss observed:

"On the one hand, a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future" (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 209).

If we examine the verb forms (perfect and imperfect) used in this text, it is immediately apparent that the main framing narrative of the Pancatantra, the five tantras and the hundred-odd embedded units are all set in the indefinite and remote past. I suggest that this serves to generalize the discourse in a temporal dimension. There is a close analogy to the spatial generalization of discourse described above. If the text illustrates a discourse that was true in the immensely remote past, does that not add to its verisimilitude here, today? As the folklore scholar Lüthi said of the German equivalent of "Once upon a time":

"The phrase 'Es war einmal' by no means is intended to stress the fact that events in the tale took place in the past. The intent is to suggest the very opposite: what occurred, has the tendency continually to occur" (Lüthi 1970: 47).

Turning now from the universalisation of time to the question of the intended audience of the Pancatantra, the text generalises its own audience. It claims, not inaccurately, that the Pancatantra 'spread across the surface of the earth" (bhūtale pravṛttam PT 2.16). This is indeed the case: in premodern times, the Pancatantra spread in one form or another from Bali to Iceland and from Korea to Ethiopia. The Pancatantra further claims that "anyone who reads or hears this text will never be overcome, even by Indra" (PT 2.17-18). There is a confidence in this enunciation, and a conviction that while the narratives may have been created for children, their creators regarded the discursive truths for which the stories are vectors as having a universal applicability, in terms of geographical spread and in social spread.

3. The śāstric paradigm

I will now briefly explore the relationship of the Pancatantra with the class of texts known as the śāstras, particularly the nītiśāstras (treatises on kingly conduct) and the arthaśāstras (texts on statecraft and governance). Śāstras are authoritative texts that "teach people what they should and should not do" (Pollock 1985: 501). Śāstric "codification of behavior was represented across the entire cultural spectrum", and śāstras have been invested with massive authority, and possess "a nearly unchallengeable claim to normative control of cultural practice" (Pollock 1985: 499f.).

The creators of the Pancatantra consciously and conspicuously aligned their work with this genre. At many prominent points in the text they remind us that the Pancatantra is a śāstra. In the very opening lines, it is compared to the best of all the arthaśāstras (PT 1.2-3). Time and again we are reminded of the benefits of listening to this "nītiśāstra", a discourse on political science (e.g. PT 2.15, PT 2.17). Indeed, the Pancatantra is almost synonymous with this genre, and is often regarded as the nītiśāstra par excellence.

But is the Pancatantra really a nītiśāstra? Is it really a handbook of kingly conduct? Is it really about governance and statecraft? Or is it a collection of amusing didactic tales for children? If one compares the Pancatantra with other master works in this genre, such as Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra, Kāmandaki's Nītasāra, or Somadeva's Nītivākyāmṛta, one finds little or no resemblance. Curiously, the fact that the Pancatantra may not "really" be a nītiśāstra may not be important. The crucial point is that the Pancatantra is widely regarded as a nītiśāstra, and indeed functions as if it were one. That is to say, merely by claiming to be a śāstra, the text avails itself of the power, authority and validity that is accorded to all other members of that genre. It is, it appears, a collection of amusing tales masquerading as a serious guide to political conduct.

Related to this is a phenomenon we might call the Fürstenspiegel effect. A Fürstenspiegel is a medieval "mirror for princes", that is, a compendium of useful advice on governance. No Western scholar, and I imagine few Indian readers, really believe that Amaraśakti, his three sons and Viṣṇuśarman were historical figures, but for some reason every writer from the medieval translator Ibn al-Muqaffa to modern scholars, including Olivelle and Rajan, choose to accept the artifice that the Pancatantra was written for the edification of princes (Jallad 2004, Olivelle 1997, Rajan 1993). It seems to me highly unlikely that was in fact the case, but again it does not matter whether or not the Pancatantra was indeed written for princes. The important point is that the text benefits from these royal and courtly pretensions, as by claiming for itself this association, it is elevated and valorized.

4. Intertextuality

Intertextuality as formulated primarily by Kristeva, Barthes and Foucault holds that each text exists as a node in a network of discursive links. Barthes could easily have been writing about the Pancatantra when he said:

"Any text is a new tissue of past citation. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc. pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text" (Barthes 1981: 39).

The narrative units which now make up the Pancatantra are found scattered across the Sanskritic corpus in such collections as Śukasaptati, Vikramacarita, Vetālapancaviṃśati, Mahābhārata, etc. Stories found in the Pancatantra are found in bas-reliefs on monuments across India. There is also a free movement of stories between the literary traditions and the oral tradition. Many Pancatantra stories are now widely published as comics, cartoons, DVDs and websites.

The same thing might be said of the thousand-odd subhāṣitas, or "elegant sayings", that are included in Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra. Sternbach (1971) found these also in the Arthaśāstra, Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaṇa, Manusmṛti, Bhartṛhāri's Śātakas, Nītisāra and Hitopadeśa.

The narrative units and subhāṣitas of the Pancatantra do not exist independently, but are indeed all nodes in an intertextual network. Of course it is impossible to measure or compare the overall discursive impact of narratives that might be found in just one or two sources and others that recur in multiple contexts and in various media. But it is even more difficult to imagine that the impact could not be strengthened when such a unit is encountered repeatedly. The net impact of multiple encounters with narrative units, that is, the intertextuality of the text, I suggest, serves to heighten the truth effect of the whole.

5. Naturalization of the discourse

This brings us to the fifth and final aspect. Pollock observed that in śāstras in general, "the living, social, historical, contingent tradition is naturalized, becoming as much a part of the order of things as the laws of nature themselves" (Pollock 1985: 516). This was taken further by B. K. Smith (1994) who demonstrated how the varṇa system was projected on to natural phenomena: trees, asterisms, animals, etc.

The particular discourse that elsewhere I have examined most closely in the Pancatantra is that of varṇa (Taylor 2007). I took three aspects of varṇa discourse, namely the individual's station, essential nature (svabhāva) and peers. This discourse, which was originally formulated in the greater brahminical archive in reference to the varṇas in human society, was projected in the Pancatantra into the natural world in the context of the jāti of the animal characters of the narrative. Here we see the discourse of social division as it applies to jackals, lions, hares, deer and the rest. The "discovery" of this discourse in the "natural" world of the fictive forest societies of the Pancatantra is then recruited to validate the existence of varṇa and its characteristics in human society. The Pancatantra purports to show how animals are ordered and characterized by jāti. The subtext shows how "natural" it is that human societies should also be ordered in the same way by the system of varṇa. The "discovery" of the discourse of division in the natural world makes it appear natural, normal, real and by implication "true".

Conclusion

For over a hundred years, it has been assumed that the collection of Sanskrit narrative fables known as Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra 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", it was therefore not only obvious, but inevitable that the Pancatantra was a Jaina text. This paper challenges both these assumptions, and demonstrates that Pūrṇabhadra's Pancatantra is a product of a broadly Brahminical, Hindu, episteme, and that the redactor, rather than being trapped in the imaginaire of Jaina society, acted as an empowered agent to draw on the epistemic traditions of his choice. This challenges our understanding of pre-modern literary production in the Jaina thought-world and the workings of epistemic communities more generally.

We have seen that the Pancatantra operates within a five-fold "regime of truth". First, its authoritative voice is accentuated by the fact that it exists as a written text, by the use of Sanskrit as the creators' language-of-choice, by the interplay of anonymity and authority, and by various textual strategies, specifically the use of the passive voice. Second, the universalisation of time, space and audiences contributes to the universalisation and validity of the discourse. Third, by aligning itself to the śāstric paradigm, the text partakes of the power inherent in that genre. Fourth, the text exists as an intertext and its intertextuality serves to empower the discourse. Finally we commented on the naturalisation of discourse, that is, the projection of socially constructed values and systems into the natural world, and their subsequent recruitment by means of the narratives back into the social world of humans. Taken together, these five aspects provide the regime under which, for the past 2000 years, the Pancatantra has been able to function as "true" for members of its "intended audience" within a broadly Indic epistemic community.

What then of the Jaina influences? When examining doctrinal passages of the "Jaina Rāmāyaṇas", De Clercq (2008: 98) found that their "only real function appears to be that of an intermezzo, a moment of reflection within the lengthy Rāma epic, promoting and glorifying the ideals of Jainism before the audience". Even that level of Jaina influence is lacking from Pūṛnabhadra's Pancatantra, let alone the propagation of "key Jain virtues" that we might expect.

With the single exception of a tale in which a Śvetāmbara monk humiliates a member of the rival Digambara tradition (Story 1.22), no explicitly Jaina content is to be found. Pūrṇabhadra's is no more a Jaina recension than Hertel's is a German one, or Olivelle's American. None of these editors left much in the way of ideological fingerprints on their work. I suggest, on the other hand, that Pūṛnabhadra's Pancatantra represents a different type of literary activity. The minister Śrīsoma who commissioned Pūrṇabhadra to edit a new version of the Pancatantra was in fact outsourcing the tricky business of collating and correcting multiple error-ridden recensions. As a member of a highly literate Jaina community, with a mastery of Sanskrit grammar, Pūrṇabhadra was well placed to accept the commission. Pūrṇabhadra occupied a Jaina imaginaire, but rather than creating a work of Jaina literature, one that reflected Jaina practices and ideals, or that was shaped by Jaina discourses, he produced one of the masterworks of the Brahmanical archive.

It is generally assumed that we are products of our discursive universes, and are subject to the imaginaire, the "mental image" of a society which constitutes the framework and sets the limits of that society's modes of thought and practice (Duby 1980: 5). That the Jaina Pūrṇabhadra wrote the broadly Brahminical Pancatantra throws into question the relationship between agency of the individual and the controlling nature of discourse within a given episteme.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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