(Mis)Understanding Hinduism: Representations of Hinduism in Jaina Purāṇas

(Mis)Understanding Hinduism reconstructs a history of representations of Hindu religion from narratives composed by Digambara Jainas between the seventh and ninth century of the Common Era. I centralize the earliest extant Jaina Sanskrit purāṇas composed in Sanskrit: Raviṣeṇa’s Padmacarita, Jinasena’s Harivaṃśapurāṇa, Jinasena II’s Ādipurāṇa, and Guṇabhadra’s Uttarapurāṇa. These texts were composed during an era in which literary and philosophical production flourished through the medium of Sanskrit. As such, Sanskrit Jaina purāṇas narrate tales of the origin of Hindu religion, seeking to understand the ways in which Sanskrit Hindu texts construct religion and develop practices for this representation. I undertake close readings of these Jaina narratives about religious others, and ask: What do Jaina narratives tell us about the construction of Hindu religion? And how do Jainas use narratives to construct religious identities? In the first case, Jaina narratives express a stable understanding of what constitutes religion. However, the contents of discourses, practices, communities, and institutions identified with the religious other shift according to the representations that were being produced contemporaneously by Hindu texts, as well as the Jaina author’s own understanding of the relation between Jainism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism. As such, Jaina narratives represent Hindu religion as that which is constructed relationally through historically embedded dialogues. In the second case, origin tales from the earliest Sanskrit Jaina purāṇas consolidate a method for representing the religious other that distinguishes them from methods used by earlier Prakrit Jaina texts and contemporaneous Sanskrit Hindu texts. They use narrative devices as sites for unifying Hindu self-representations—especially from narrative and philosophical texts—as well as their attendant practices of representation into a single religion. The findings of this dissertation thus cast Sanskrit Jaina purāṇas from the first millennium as a critically important site through which we can understand the construction of Hindu religion before the rise of doxography in the second millennium. In doing so, this study augments the study of Hinduism with the study of Jainism, and the study of religion with the study of narratives