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Abhinav Pandey

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Umāsvāti

A figure from the books

#Umasvati

Umāsvāti · c. 2nd–5th century CE

In the books · 1 chapter

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Who this is

Philosophy — the systematizer of Jainism; author of the Tattvārthasūtra, the first Jain work written in Sanskrit and the one text every branch of the tradition accepts.

“The Jain church split over everything — clothing, women, whether the scriptures had even survived — and could not split this book; and the line that a 2,500-year-old religion chose as its motto sits, quietly, in the middle of a physics lesson.”
— The Great Indians, Ch. 51

The big idea, in the book's words:

“The whole of Jain doctrine — souls, karma as sticky matter, the path out — compressed into roughly 350 Sanskrit aphorisms so exact that both halves of a divided religion have kept the same book as scripture for some fifteen centuries.”
— The Great Indians, Ch. 51

From the book

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