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Abstract
At the turn of the first millennium, some Jaina thinkers raised an unprecedented question: why should one story be accepted over others? This question emerged within a social and religious environment in which various groups told and retold competing versions of popular narratives, such as the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. While certain groups privileged specific versions, they rarely articulated the criteria by which a story should be evaluated or accepted as authoritative. This dissertation examines how a body of Jaina narrative literature called the Investigation of Dharma confronts this question. Focusing on its two earliest extant versions—Hariṣeṇa’s Apabhramsha Dhammaparikkhā (988 CE) and Amitagati’s Sanskrit Dharmaparīkṣā (1014 CE)—I argue that the Investigation models a theory of adjudicating narrative credibility and, by extension, testimonial authority. Through a close analysis of these texts, I demonstrate how their authors used narrative literature to train audiences in evaluating the credibility of stories, thereby cultivating readers capable of discerning authoritative knowledge from falsehood. These works, I argue, engage a rich premodern South Asian literary milieu—one characterized by multiple coexisting versions of shared stories—in order to offer explicit models for evaluating the truthfulness of stories and the ethical stakes of accepting or rejecting them. Framed by the repeated appearance of two Vidyādhara protagonists—a Jaina layman and his friend—who engage in debate with Brahmins by presenting a series of implausible stories, the Investigation uses narrative form to stage epistemological dilemmas that mirror those faced by readers of purāṇic literature. These nested stories raise questions about what makes a story credible and what it means to evaluate a story’s claims. In this reading, the Investigation functions as a literary device for cultivating epistemic virtues in its audience by immersing them in staged scenarios that demand critical evaluation and judgment of the stories they encounter. Moreover, my dissertation demonstrates that Hariṣeṇa and Amitagati did not write in a vacuum. By situating the Investigation in conversation with a broader body of Jaina thinkers across languages and time, I reconstruct the ways its authors conceptualized their project in relation to their literary environment and intellectual interlocutors. Framed in this way, I suggest, the Investigation emerges as part of a wider Jaina discourse on reason and the evaluation of authority—one that opens further possibilities for the study of South Asian literature.