Jainism

Distillation of Jainism — Decision Record

This README fixes which texts and which translation are distilled, and who reviewed the choices.

Tradition

• Slug: jainism
• Tradition / family: Jainism — specifically the Śvetāmbara Āgama stratum, the oldest surviving Jain canonical layer. (The Digambara tradition rejects the Śvetāmbara Āgamas as the authentic canon; this is a sectarian boundary, noted in the methodology file.)
• Primary frame in one sentence: a non-theistic path of radical non-violence (ahiṃsā) and ascetic self-purification by which the eternal soul (jīva) sheds the subtle matter of karma and attains omniscient liberation (kevala / mokṣa).

Canon selection (what is included, and why)

Text	Included?	Rationale
Ākārāṅga Sūtra (Āyāraṅga)	yes (first)	The first Aṅga; the oldest surviving Jain text; its Book I is the foundational statement of ahiṃsā toward the six classes of life → highest lived-centrality
Sūtrakṛtāṅga Sūtra (Sūyagaḍa)	yes	The second Aṅga; doctrinal — defends the Jain account of soul, bondage, and non-possession against rival schools
Uttarādhyayana Sūtra	yes	A Mūla-sūtra; among the most studied/recited Jain texts; the great compendium of monastic discipline, the soul, karma, and the three jewels → very high lived-centrality
Kalpa Sūtra (Lives of the Jinas)	yes	The Lives of the Jinas (esp. Mahāvīra's renunciation and asceticism); recited annually at Paryuṣaṇa → exceptional liturgical centrality. (Jacobi prints it within SBE 22.)
Tattvārtha Sūtra	excluded	Doctrinally central and pan-sectarian, but its standard English translations are modern/copyrighted. We rely on the public-domain Jacobi Āgama translations and flag this gap.
Later commentarial / Digambara texts	noted	Out of scope for this public-domain pass; referenced only where Jacobi's notes require.

• Full-canon commitment: the four texts above cover the load-bearing ethical/anthropological/soteriological core. The full Śvetāmbara canon (45 Āgamas) is larger; this is a principled core selection, not the whole canon, and is flagged as such.

Translation policy

• Named translation: Hermann Jacobi, Jaina Sūtras, in The Sacred Books of the East (ed. F. Max Müller), Oxford: Clarendon Press —
• SBE vol. XXII (1884): Ākārāṅga Sūtra + Kalpa Sūtra.
• SBE vol. XLV (1895): Uttarādhyayana Sūtra + Sūtrakṛtāṅga Sūtra.
• Both public domain.
• Access (raw plaintext via curl, not WebFetch):
• SBE 22: Internet Archive jainasutrasparti029233mbp — _djvu.txt
• SBE 45: Internet Archive mlbd.gainasutraspart20000vol-45.unse — _djvu.txt
• Why this translation: the only complete, scholarly, unambiguously public-domain English rendering of the core Jain Āgamas. Caveats: (a) 1884/1895 diction and Romanization predate IAST (Jacobi writes "Ginas/Gainas" for Jinas/Jainas, "Nirgrantha" for the monk, "Brâhmaṇa", etc.); (b) the source is OCR of the printed volumes, so diacritics and some characters are corrupted in the plain text — working quotes normalize obvious OCR noise.
• Quote accuracy: char-for-char verified against Internet Archive OCR of SBE 22/45. See quote-audit-jainism.md — PASS (52 anchors; 48 PASS, 1 DRIFT fixed, 2 P-card verb-form drifts, 1 NOT_FOUND).
• Untranslatable terms to preserve: ahiṃsā, anekāntavāda, syādvāda, aparigraha, jīva, ajīva, karma, kevala, saṃvara, mokṣa, parīṣaha, Nirgrantha, Tīrthaṅkara (Jacobi's English/Romanized renderings are glossed against these).

Reviewer / standpoint

• Within-tradition reviewer: none secured.
• Therefore: this output is "one structured reading, not authoritative", and the reviewer gap is flagged. The Śvetāmbara/Digambara divide means even "Jainism" here is a standpoint (Śvetāmbara Āgama), not the whole tradition.

Structure for this tradition

• Atomic unit ("books/"): a text-section of one of the four sources (e.g., an Ākārāṅga lecture, an Uttarādhyayana lecture). Granularity is matched to the canon's size (per-section, covering each text's load-bearing material).
• Internal convergence layer?: not used as a separate pass; the four texts are pooled directly into the core principles synthesis, with the source text noted on every principle's Covers/Evidence. (A future convergence pass could treat the four texts as independent sources.)
• Sensitivity boundaries: take care not to (a) collapse Jain ahiṃsā into a generic "compassion" — its scope (earth-, water-, fire-, wind-, plant-, and animal-bodies) and its grounding (karma-as-matter, not a divine command) are distinctive; (b) read later/Digambara doctrine into these early texts; (c) present the ascetic ideal (nudity, fasting unto death) as the lay norm.

Files

File	Status
Methodology	done
Index and traceability	done
Per-section extractions	done — 8 sections across 4 texts, 55 atomic statements
Core principles	done — 13 core principles
Structural analysis	done
Rooted compass	done