Hemacandra in Three Ideas
the essentialsA grammar for a kingdom
His Siddhahemaśabdānuśāsana gave Gujarat a Sanskrit and Prakrit grammar to rival Pāṇini, and preserved the earliest Apabhraṃśa poems.
Yoga for householders
The Yogaśāstra adapts Jain discipline for laypeople — vows, meditation and the twelve reflections.
The logic of many-sidedness
His Pramāṇamīmāṃsā is a mature statement of Jain epistemology.
Hemacandra (1088–1172) was a Śvetāmbara Jain monk and one of the most prodigious scholars in Indian history. Born at Dhandhuka in Gujarat as Cāṅgadeva, he became a monk as a child, and rose to become adviser to two kings of the Caulukya (Solaṅkī) dynasty at Aṇahilapāṭaka (Patan): Jayasiṃha Siddharāja and Kumārapāla. His admirers called him Kalikālasarvajña, “the omniscient one of the Kali age”.
His works cover almost every field of learning. The Siddhahemaśabdānuśāsana, a grammar of Sanskrit and Prakrit commissioned by Siddharāja to give Gujarat a grammar of its own, quotes many verses in Apabhraṃśa that are among the earliest specimens of the language from which Gujarati, Hindi and other modern languages developed. He wrote lexicons (the Abhidhānacintāmaṇi, Deśīnāmamālā of regional words), a treatise on poetics (Kāvyānuśāsana), a treatise on metre (Chandonuśāsana, in which he described the sequence 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13… — the “Hemacandra” or Fibonacci numbers — as counts of rhythmic patterns), a work on logic (Pramāṇamīmāṃsā), a hymn to Mahāvīra (Vītarāgastotra), a vast history of the sixty-three great men of Jain tradition (Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita), and the Yogaśāstra, a manual of Jain ethics and meditation for the laity, written for King Kumārapāla.
Under his influence, Kumārapāla adopted Jainism, and is said to have prohibited animal slaughter, hunting, gambling and the confiscation of the property of widows. Hemacandra embodies the Jain intellectual ideal: the monk as scholar, and scholarship in the service of ahiṃsā.
Curiosities
did you know?- He described a numerical sequence — later known in the West as the Fibonacci numbers — in his study of Sanskrit metre, about fifty years before Fibonacci.
- Under his influence King Kumārapāla is said to have forbidden animal slaughter, hunting and gambling in his kingdom.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can one person master everything worth knowing?
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsTattvārtha Sūtra
Umāsvāti’s “Manual of the Meaning of the Reals” — the first Sanskrit summary of Jain philosophy, 350 sūtras accepted by both Digambaras and Śvetāmbaras, covering knowledge, souls, the universe, karma, ethics and liberation.
Anekāntavāda
The Jain doctrine that reality is many-sided — that every thing has infinite aspects and every statement captures only one, so that truth requires holding many viewpoints together. Expressed in the parable of the blind men and the elephant and formalised in the sevenfold logic of syādvāda.
Kundakunda
The most revered Digambara Jain teacher — author of the Samayasāra, which distinguishes the absolute standpoint, from which the soul is pure consciousness untouched by karma, from the conventional standpoint, from which it is bound.
Mīmāṃsā
The school of Vedic interpretation — the hermeneutics of ritual and duty that treated the Veda as eternal and authorless, defended the self-validity of knowledge, denied a creator God, and developed theories of language, meaning and law that shaped all of Hindu jurisprudence.
Jaimini
The sage credited with the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, the founding text of Vedic hermeneutics — and, in legend, a disciple of Vyāsa who heard the Mahābhārata from his master.
Mahāvīra
The twenty-fourth and last tīrthaṅkara of Jainism — a prince of the eastern Gaṅgā plain who renounced everything at thirty, practised twelve years of extreme austerity, attained omniscience, and taught a path of radical non-violence, truth and non-possession for thirty years.