Buddhism and Jainism: later development and decline

Jaina cosmology recognises four gatis or states of existence into which a soul may be reborn, namely deva or celestial beings, manushya or humans, tiryancha covering animals and plants, and naraki or hell beings. Yakshas are attendant demi-gods who appear in Jaina iconography as guardian deities paired with the tirthankaras, but they are not a separate gati, and in the scheme they fall within the deva category.

Hence (b) is the item not included and is the correct answer. (a), (c) and (d) each name one of the four recognised gatis and are therefore included, which rules them out. The one gati absent from the option set is naraki, which is what makes the question solvable by direct recall of the fourfold scheme.

• Statement 1 is correct, since Amaravati stands on the right bank of the Krishna in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, in the lower reaches of that valley, an area that also holds Nagarjunakonda, Jaggayyapeta and Ghantasala.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the eliminator. The Amaravati mahachaitya was the largest stupa in India, with a drum diameter of roughly fifty metres against about thirty six metres for the Great Stupa at Sanchi, so ranking it second to Sanchi reverses the position.
• Statement 3 is correct, because the Amaravati idiom of slender, animated figures in crowded narrative panels shaped later Andhra and Pallava work, and Amaravati limestone slabs and the style derived from them travelled to Sri Lanka and to sites in Southeast Asia along the maritime routes.

Hence 1 and 3 hold and (b) is correct. (a) drops the well attested statement on artistic influence, while (c) and (d) accept the false size comparison.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the discriminator. The stupa derives from the pre Buddhist funerary tumulus, the earthen burial mound raised over the remains of the dead, a practice referred to in Vedic literature and found in megalithic contexts. Buddhism adopted and elaborated the form rather than originating it, and Jainism used it as well.
• Statement 2 is correct. The classic stupa enshrines relics, whether corporeal remains of the Buddha or a disciple, or objects used by them, which is the basis of the distinction between sharirika and paribhogika stupas.
• Statement 3 is correct. Stupas were also raised as votive offerings by pilgrims and as commemorative markers at sites associated with events in the Buddha's life, giving rise to the further categories of uddesika and votive stupas. Two statements stand, giving (b).
• Option (c) requires Buddhist origin to be accepted, and (a) and (d) deny the relic and commemorative functions that define the form.

• Pair 1 is incorrect. Devichandraguptam is a Sanskrit play attributed to Vishakhadatta, who also wrote Mudrarakshasa. Bilhana wrote the Vikramankadevacharita in praise of the Chalukya Vikramaditya the Sixth.
• Pair 2 is correct. Hammira Mahakavya was composed by the Jaina scholar Nayachandra Suri in the fifteenth century on Hammira of Ranthambhor.
• Pair 3 is incorrect. Milindapanha is a Pali dialogue between the Indo Greek king Menander and the monk Nagasena, and it is Nagasena rather than Nagarjuna who is the interlocutor. Nagarjuna was the Madhyamaka philosopher of a later period, and the similarity of the two names is the trap.
• Pair 4 is correct. Nitivakyamrita is a work on polity by Somadeva Suri, author also of Yashastilaka. Two pairs match, giving (b).

• Pair 1 is incorrect. Besnagar near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh is celebrated for the Heliodorus pillar, a Garuda column erected by a Greek ambassador of Taxila who described himself as a Bhagavata, making the site a landmark of early Vaishnavism rather than a Shaivite cave shrine, and it is not a cave site at all.
• Pair 2 is correct. Bhaja in Maharashtra is an early Hinayana rock cut complex with a chaitya hall of the second century before the common era, its wooden ribbed vault and horseshoe arch showing the timber prototypes being translated into stone.
• Pair 3 is correct. Sittanavasal in Tamil Nadu is a Jaina rock cut cave temple noted for its Pandya period frescoes, particularly the lotus tank composition, often compared with Ajanta in technique. Two pairs match, giving (b).

• Pair 1 is incorrectly matched. Aryadeva was a Buddhist, not a Jaina, scholar, the principal disciple of Nagarjuna and author of the Chatuhshataka, a foundational figure of the Madhyamaka school.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. Dignaga was a Buddhist scholar, the founder of the Buddhist school of logic and epistemology, whose Pramanasamuchchaya reshaped Indian philosophical debate and drew responses from Brahmanical logicians for centuries.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched. Nathamuni was a Vaishnava scholar, the first of the Sri Vaishnava acharyas, who recovered and organised the Tamil hymns of the Alvars into the Nalayira Divya Prabandham and established their liturgical use in temple worship. Exactly two pairs are correct, giving (c).
• Option (d) requires accepting Aryadeva as a Jaina, option (b) requires rejecting one of the two sound pairs, and option (a) rejects all three.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Sthaviravadins, the elders, are the conservative school that survives as Theravada and is grouped under Hinayana. They stood in opposition to the Mahasanghikas, from whose line Mahayana tendencies emerged.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Lokottaravadins, who held that the Buddha was transcendent and that his earthly life was an appearance, were an offshoot of the Mahasanghika school.
• Statement 3 is correct. The Mahasanghika elevation of the Buddha from teacher to object of devotion, together with the bodhisattva ideal, supplied the theological foundation on which Mahayana developed. Correct combination is 2 and 3, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (d) misplace the Sthaviravadins in Mahayana, and (c) drops the Lokottaravadin link.

In Mahayana doctrine the paramitas are the perfections cultivated by one who takes the bodhisattva vow, classically six in number, namely giving, moral conduct, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom. Hence (c).

• Option (a) is wrong because the earliest aphoristic legal texts are the Dharmasutras of Gautama, Baudhayana, Apastamba and Vasishtha.
• Option (b) is wrong because schools rejecting Vedic authority are the nastika systems, Charvaka, Buddhism and Jainism.
• Option (d) is wrong because the great southern trading corporations are the Ayyavole or Five Hundred Svamis of Aihole, the Manigramam and the Nanadesi. The trap here is that all four options describe genuine categories from Indian cultural history, so elimination alone will not work and the term itself must be known.

• Option (b) is correct. The Sthanakvasi are a sect of Svetambara Jainism, founded in the seventeenth century by Lavaji and tracing its impulse to the fifteenth century reformer Lonka Shah. Its defining position is the rejection of idol worship and of temple based ritual, on the argument that image worship finds no sanction in the canonical texts and involves himsa. Sthanakvasi monks and nuns therefore worship in a plain hall, the sthanak from which the sect takes its name, rather than in a temple, and they wear the muhpatti, a strip of cloth over the mouth, to avoid harm to airborne life.
• Options (c) and (d) are wrong for a reason that also supplies the elimination: Vaishnavism and Shaivism are the two great theistic streams of Hinduism and both are centrally organised around temple worship and image devotion, so a sect defined by the rejection of idols could hardly belong to either.
• Option (a) is wrong, and it is the plausible distractor because Buddhism and Jainism are grouped together as the heterodox traditions and Buddhism has its own non theistic strands; but the Sthanakvasi are not a Buddhist school, and Buddhism's Indian sectarian divisions run along the Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana lines rather than through this dispute. Placing the sect correctly also fixes the wider map of Jain divisions: Digambara and Svetambara at the first level, and within the Svetambara the image worshipping Murtipujaka against the non image worshipping Sthanakvasi and the later Terapanthi, which broke from the Sthanakvasi in the eighteenth century.

Hence (b).

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Sautrantika and the Sammitiya were schools of Buddhism, not sects of Jainism. The Sautrantikas took their name from their insistence that the sutras alone, and not the Abhidharma, are authoritative, and they held a rigorous doctrine of momentariness. The Sammitiyas were the principal school of the Pudgalavada or personalist tradition, controversial within Buddhism for maintaining a pudgala, an inexpressible person, neither identical with nor different from the aggregates. Jain divisions run on entirely different lines, Digambara and Svetambara, with sub sects such as the Sthanakavasi and the Terapanthi.
• Statement 2 is correct and states the central Sarvastivada doctrine, from which the school takes its name, sarvam asti, all exists. Against the general Buddhist position that a dharma exists only in the present instant, the Sarvastivadins held that the constituents of phenomena exist in all three times, past, present and future, and that what changes is not their existence but their mode or activity, so that a dharma persists latently before and after its moment of operation. The item is difficult because there is no elimination route and both statements demand a level of doctrinal detail well beyond ordinary preparation; a candidate who merely recognises Sautrantika as Buddhist can, however, reject statement 1 and reduce the question to (b) against (d).

• Option (a) is correct. The Bodhisattva Padmapani, so named for the lotus held in his hand, occupies the left wall flanking the antechamber of Cave 1 at Ajanta, facing the Bodhisattva Vajrapani on the right, and belongs to the Vakataka phase of the fifth century. It is the single most reproduced image in Indian painting, admired for the modelling achieved through tonal gradation, the downcast contemplative expression conveying karuna, and the fluent outline.
• Option (b) is wrong: Badami has Chalukyan rock cut cave temples with some surviving mural fragments, but nothing of this celebrity, and its reputation rests on sculpture.
• Option (c) is wrong and is the most respectable distractor, since the Bagh caves in Madhya Pradesh do carry Buddhist murals closely related in style and period to Ajanta, but the Padmapani is not among them.
• Option (d) is wrong: Ellora's fame rests on rock cut architecture and sculpture across Buddhist, Hindu and Jain excavations, above all the Kailasa temple, rather than on painting, though traces of murals survive there. Governing principle: attach each site to the art form that made it famous, Ajanta to painting, Ellora and Badami to rock cut architecture and sculpture, and Bagh to painting of the Ajanta family but at a lower order of preservation and renown.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminating statement. The Bodhisattva ideal is central to Mahayana, not Hinayana. The Hinayana or Theravada path holds up the arhat, who attains nirvana through individual discipline and insight and does not remain to ferry others across; the term bodhisattva does appear in the earlier tradition, but confined to the previous lives of Gautama himself, not as a general ideal open to all practitioners.
• Statement 2 is correct: the Bodhisattva is defined by karuna, compassion, joined to the aspiration for bodhi, and is one who has generated the awakening mind but has not yet attained full Buddhahood, hence 'on his way to enlightenment'.
• Statement 3 is correct and states the vow that distinguishes the ideal: the Bodhisattva postpones final nirvana in order to work for the liberation of all sentient beings, Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri and Maitreya being the best known figures. Hence 2 and 3, giving (b).
• Options (a), (c) and (d) all fail: (a) and (d) accept the Hinayana attribution, and (c) rejects the self-postponement vow which is the very content of the ideal. Recognising the Mahayana attribution alone settles the question.

• Pairs 1 and 3 are correctly matched and pair 2 is not, so the official answer is (c).
• Pair 1 is correct: Cave 26 at Ajanta, a chaitya hall of the Vakataka phase, carries on its left wall the great reclining Mahaparinirvana image of the Buddha, some seven metres long, with celestial beings rendered in the space above the figure and the grieving disciples below, the contrast between serene detachment above and human grief below being the point of the composition.
• Pair 3 is correct: the vast open-air relief at Mamallapuram, carved on two adjoining granite boulders under the Pallavas in the seventh century, is variously read as Arjuna's penance for the Pasupata weapon or as the descent of the Ganga, the natural cleft between the boulders serving as the course of the river.
• Pair 2 is incorrect: the celebrated Varaha panel showing the boar incarnation raising Bhudevi from the waters is at Udayagiri near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, a Gupta period rock-cut site of about the early fifth century, and is read as an allegory of Chandragupta II's conquests. Mount Abu is famous for something else entirely, the Dilwara Jain temples with their marble ceilings and pillars, which belong to the eleventh to thirteenth centuries and are architecture rather than narrative relief. The item is decided on pair 2, and rejecting it removes (a) and (d).

A chaitya is the prayer hall, characteristically apsidal in plan with a long nave, side aisles separated by rows of pillars, a vaulted roof carved in imitation of timber ribs, a horseshoe shaped chaitya window over the entrance admitting light down the nave, and a votive stupa at the apsidal end which is the object of circumambulation and worship. Karle, Bhaja, Bedsa and Cave 19 at Ajanta are the standard examples. A vihara is the monastery, a quadrangular hall with small cells cut into three of its sides for the monks to live in, and in the later phase a shrine chamber added on the rear wall so that the two functions merged.

• Option (b) states this correctly and is the official answer.
• Option (a) is incorrect because it simply reverses the two terms, and it is the only serious distractor in the set.
• Option (c) is incorrect because it misdescribes the relation as one between parts of a single cave rather than between two building types; the stupa at the far end is a component of the chaitya, not a synonym for it.
• Option (d) is incorrect because the difference is functional and is expressed in the plan, the chaitya being apsidal and the vihara quadrangular. The elimination route is the etymology carried in ordinary usage: vihara survives in place names such as Bihar, from the density of Buddhist monasteries there, and the word has always meant the residence.

• Statement 1 is correct. In Jain doctrine karma is not a moral abstraction but a subtle material substance, pudgala, which flows into the soul through asrava and binds it through bandha. Liberation therefore requires two operations, samvara, the stopping of fresh inflow, and nirjara, the shedding of accumulated karmic matter, and nirjara is accomplished by tapas, austerity and penance, in its external and internal forms. Penance is thus literally the method of destroying karma, culminating in sallekhana, the fast unto death.
• Statement 2 is correct. Jainism extends jiva far beyond the animate world of ordinary usage: the ekendriya or one sensed beings include the earth bodied, water bodied, fire bodied, air bodied and plant bodied souls, so a particle of earth or a drop of water has a soul. This is the doctrinal foundation of Jain ahimsa in its most rigorous form, which is why the Jain monastic discipline governs walking, drinking, sweeping and breathing.
• Statement 3 is correct and follows from the first: karma is what obstructs the soul's innate qualities of infinite knowledge, perception, bliss and energy, so it is the bane of the soul and its complete removal is moksha. All three being correct, the official answer is (d). The unifying principle is the materiality of karma in Jainism, which distinguishes it from the Buddhist and Brahmanical treatments and from which all three statements follow.