ABSTRACT
The modern Tapa Gaccha scholar Muni Kalya?avijaya has argued that the Mahanisitha Sutra (MNS) was composed when Jain renunciant behaviour was in a state of decline. Acceptance of the authority of the MNS on the part of the Kharatara Gaccha is mere lipservice if other significant teachings are not also accepted. From around the fourteenth century a variety of Tapa Gaccha teachers specified what was entailed in upadhanatapas. Dharmasagara’s main polemical preoccupation centred on the question of lay eligibility to perform the upadhanatapas, rejected, as he claims, by the Paurjamiyaka Gaccha and its founder Candraprabhasuri. For Dharmasagara, a prime characteristic of belonging to the tirtha is acceptance of the full scriptural status of the MNS. For Dharmasagara, failure to subscribe to the authority of the ancient Prakrit commentaries means falling into the scriptural category of ‘enemy of the meaning of the sutras’, with meaning being taken as relating to the formal explication of the scriptures.
