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A Canon, and Three Ways of Using It

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A Canon, and Three Ways of Using It

The Svetambaras have scripture, and that is the second great difference.

They hold a canon of forty-five Agamas, descending from Mahavira's teaching by oral transmission and codified at a council at Vallabhi in Gujarat in the fifth century, the year is given as 454 in some sources and as 453 or 466 in others, under Devardhigani Kshamashramana, prompted by the recognition that famine had already cost the community a great deal of what it once held. The Digambaras reject that codification, holding the original teaching to have been lost beyond recovery.

The tradition has three principal branches, and they divide over images rather than over the canon.

Murtipujaka, the image-worshipping majority, maintains the great temple complexes (Ranakpur, Palitana, the Dilwara temples at Mount Abu), and organises its ascetics in gacchas under acharyas.

Sthanakvasi emerged around 1476 from a reform movement associated with Lonka Shah, which held that image worship has no scriptural warrant and that the temple economy had corrupted the religion. Its ascetics wear a cloth over the mouth continually, to avoid harming airborne life, and it worships in plain halls rather than temples.

Terapanth, founded by Acharya Bhikshu in the eighteenth century as a further reform of the Sthanakvasi, is aniconic and is the one Jain body with a genuinely centralised authority: a single acharya heads the entire order, which is unusual in a religion otherwise organised as a federation of teacher-lineages.

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