The Virtuous Vernacular: Cultivating Jain Women’s Moral Conduct (Śīla) in a Fifteenth-Century Gujarati Story Collection

In the fifteenth century, Śvetāmbara Jain monks produced a voluminous body of literature in Gujarati (Māru-Gūrjara). Didactic story literature comprises the greatest quantity of this emerging vernacular register, far outstripping their output of devotional poems and songs that tend to dominate studies of vernacularization. One such collection, the Śīlopadeśamālā-Bālāvabodha, instructs laywomen to view their pathway to the Jain soteriology of mokṣa as going through the upholding of family honor and prestige, especially by maintaining good wifely comportment and maintaining chastity at all costs. The contents of this story collection and manuscript evidence of its distribution give us new insight into the close connections between Śvetāmbara monastic orders (gaccha) and the caste communities who supported them. Concerns of caste purity that are policed on women’s bodies are here ideologically linked to women’s soteriological potential. Thus, early Jain works in emerging vernaculars forged and maintained ideological links between caste and sect.