Scriptures & Texts
Shatkhandagama
Jain Scriptures
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The earliest surviving Digambara text, composed by Pushpadanta and Bhutabali, and the foundation of that tradition's scriptural literature. The name means the scripture in six parts.
Its existence answers a problem the Digambara tradition holds to be real. That tradition maintains that the original teaching of Mahavira, transmitted orally in the Purvas and the Angas, was progressively lost after his death as the ascetics who held it died out, and that the Svetambara canon assembled and written down at the council at Valabhi is therefore not the original teaching but a reconstruction the Digambaras do not accept. On this account no complete canon survives at all. What the Shatkhandagama preserves is held to be a fragment of it, transmitted through a chain of teachers who retained a portion of one of the Purvas.
Its subject is karma, treated with great technical precision: the categories of soul, the stages of spiritual development, and the mechanics of karmic bondage set out in exhaustive classification. It is not a narrative or a devotional work, and it is not read publicly in the way the Kalpa Sutra is.
The text was the object of an unusual act of preservation. Its manuscripts were held at Mudbidri in Karnataka and were not permitted to be copied or studied outside a restricted circle for centuries, and it was only in the twentieth century that they were edited and published, an undertaking that took decades. The companion Digambara work, the Kasayapahuda, has a similar standing.
Any account of Jain scripture that describes the Svetambara Agamas and stops has described the canon of one order and omitted the other's position that there is no surviving canon at all.
Facts
Origins
Era of Composition Attributed Author / CompilerPushpadanta and Bhutabali, transmitting the teaching of Dharasena (traditional), c. 2nd c. CE 2 Structure
Structure"Scripture in Six Parts" 2 StructureThe oldest Digambara sacred text, expounding the theory of karma 2 Status
Canonical StatusCanonical (Jain Agama) 1Tradition: Digambara Text
Literary Form Learn More
The Oldest Digambara Scripture
The Shatkhandagama, the "Scripture in Six Parts", is the most ancient and revered sacred text of the Digambara Jain tradition. The Digambaras hold that the original teaching of Mahavira, transmitted orally, was gradually lost over the centuries after his liberation, so that no part of the old canon claimed by the Svetambaras survives intact; against this background the Shatkhandagama has special importance as the earliest surviving systematic scripture the tradition possesses. It is attributed to the monks Pushpadanta and Bhutabali, disciples of the teacher Dharasena, who is said to have imparted to them what remained of the ancient knowledge, which they set down probably around the second century CE in the Prakrit language.
The text is a highly technical exposition of the Jain theory of karma and of the states and stages through which the soul (jiva) passes on its way from bondage to liberation, organised around the doctrine of the "stations of virtue" (gunasthana) and the minute analysis of the soul's entanglement with karmic matter.
The Dhavala and Its Standing
The Shatkhandagama is famous almost as much for its great commentary as for itself. In the tenth century the scholar-monk Virasena composed on it an enormous commentary called the Dhavala, one of the monumental works of Jain learning, which preserves and expounds the ancient text and its abstruse doctrine at vast length; the survival and study of the Shatkhandagama is bound up with this and the related commentarial tradition. For much of its history the text was guarded as a sacred treasure in the Digambara monastic and manuscript tradition, and its critical edition and publication in the twentieth century was a major event in the modern study of Jainism.
The scripture holds canonical authority for the Digambaras, for whom it stands in place of the lost teaching of Mahavira, while the Svetambara tradition, which preserves its own canon, does not accord it that status. Scholars regard the Shatkhandagama as an invaluable witness to the early development of Jain karma theory and to the doctrinal history of the tradition, and as the foundation on which much of Digambara scholastic philosophy was subsequently built.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
The Shatkhandagama is this tradition's own foundational scripture, composed to answer the loss of the original agamas that this tradition holds to be real.
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