Convincing the king

In Chapter 9, Jonathan Geen examines the theme of religious conversion through dialogue in Jain sources. According to the mythological Jain Universal History, Ṛṣabha was the first of 24 jinas of the current world epoch. Beginning in the early-medieval period, a variety of Jain texts began narrating past-life stories of Ṛṣabha, including one in which he is said to have been a king named Mahābala, who was persuaded to follow the Jain dharma through witnessing a dialogue among proponents of different worldviews. By examining three versions of this story as found in Saṅghadāsa’s fifth century Vasudevahiṇḍi (VH), Jinasena’s ninth century Ādipurāṇa (ĀP) and Hemacandra’s twelfth century Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita (TŚPC), one can observe how individual Jain authors modified the dialogue both to serve Jain tradition and reflect their own historical situations. In all three versions, King Mahābala’s conversion to strict Jain practice, and thereby his path to jina-hood, began with a dialogue he witnessed. The urgency of his conversion came from the fact that the young king, unbeknownst to him, had but a month to live. In the Vasudevahiṇḍi, the earliest extant version, Mahābala’s childhood friend, learning of the king’s impending death, wished to steer him towards the Jain dharma before it was too late. In the process, he was obliged to fend off a materialist minister who encouraged Mahābala to embrace sensuality. In the ĀP and TŚPC, however, the proponent of Jainism was one of four royal ministers, who, in the king’s presence, debated and defeated three other ministers of false views (representing Materialist, Buddhist and Hindu positions). Given the close relationships between Jinasena and the Rāṣṭrakūṭa king Amoghavarṣa I, and Hemacandra and the Chaulukya king Kumārapāla, it appears likely that both authors intentionally modified the VH’s version of the story such that the Jain proponent in the dialogue was a loyal minister, steering his kingly patron through the forest of false views espoused by competing ministers at court. In doing so, they thereby mythologised their own relationship to their royal patron by surreptitiously embedding their own historical circumstances into the beginnings of the Jain Universal History.