यह पृष्ठ अभी हिन्दी में उपलब्ध नहीं है — नीचे अंग्रेज़ी संस्करण है। अनुवाद शीघ्र आ रहा है।
श्रुत पंचमी
Shruta Panchami
Commemorates the scriptures first being committed to writing, and honours the texts themselves.
The Jain teaching was carried orally for centuries after Mahavira, held by a succession of teachers who could recite it entire. That succession thinned. By the time it reached Acharya Dharasena, in a cave at Girnar, what survived of the earliest canon survived substantially in one man’s memory.
Dharasena taught what he held to two monks, Pushpadanta and Bhutabali, and they wrote it down. The result is the Shatkhandagama, the Scripture in Six Parts, and the day the writing was completed is Shruta Panchami. It is, in the Digambara account, the moment the tradition stopped depending on an unbroken chain of memory.
The day is therefore not a general celebration of learning but the commemoration of a rescue, and the anxiety in it is real: what was written down was already only a portion of what had once been held.
How it is kept
- Scriptures are ceremonially installed, worshipped and read from; the Shatkhandagama in particular.
- Temple libraries are cleaned and their manuscripts displayed.
- Discourses on the day generally recount the transmission itself — Dharasena, the cave at Girnar, the two students.
The Svetambara tradition holds that a portion of the original Purvas survives in its own Agamas, redacted at the council of Valabhi; the Digambara tradition holds that the Purvas were lost and that the Shatkhandagama is what was recovered. Shruta Panchami belongs to the second account. The Svetambara day for the scriptures is Jnana Panchami, in Kartik.