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Two Religious Leaders Translated Their Own Oldest Scripture

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Two Religious Leaders Translated Their Own Oldest Scripture

When Acharya Tulsi began, in the 1970s, compiling translations and commentaries on the Jain Agamas, the oldest layer of Jain canonical literature, he was not commissioning outside scholars to do it. Tulsi was the ninth Acharya, the supreme religious head, of the Svetambara Terapanth sect, and the man he brought in to lead the project alongside him was his own successor, Yuvacharya Mahaprajna, who would later become Acharya in his turn.

The volume that resulted in 1981, Ayaro, tackles the very first of the twelve Anga Agamas, the Acaranga Sutra, one of the oldest surviving Jain texts and the tradition's foundational statement on ascetic conduct and non-violence. It is not a light undertaking: 433 pages carrying the original Prakrit in both Devanagari and roman script, a full English translation by Muni Mahendra Kumar, and a scholarly apparatus of annotations, notes, glossary and index, published in New Delhi under the auspices of Jaina Vishva Bharati, the research institute Tulsi himself had established at Ladnun.

The distinction matters. A university press translating an ancient scripture is one kind of event. A sect's own supreme religious authority, together with the man chosen to succeed him, sitting down to translate that sect's own oldest sacred text into English for a wider readership, is another kind entirely. Terapanth did not wait for outside scholarship to make its foundational scripture accessible. Its own leadership did the work themselves, and the institute carrying that project forward continues under Tulsi's name today.

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Ayaro = Acaranga Sutra (Internet Archive)
Internet Archive (digitized catalogue record), Internet ArchiveView the Source
Acharya Tulsi (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, WikipediaView the Source
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