Upadhyaya

An upadhyaya is the ascetic who teaches the scriptures to other ascetics, the fourth of the five beings saluted in the central Jain prayer.

The office of instruction

Within the Jain monastic community the upadhyaya is charged with the teaching of the scriptures to the monks and nuns, and the office is therefore textual and instructional, the upadhyaya being the master of the sacred texts who transmits their knowledge to the ascetics under his care, so that the learning of the tradition is passed on within the order. The role stands below that of the acharya, the head of the order, and above the ordinary monks, and it is defined by the function of scriptural instruction.

Fourth of the five

The upadhyaya is saluted fourth in the Navkar Mantra, after the omniscient arihants, the liberated siddhas and the leading acharyas, and before the ordinary monks, so the salutation places the teaching office in its proper rank within the community, honoured for the transmission of the scriptures on which the life of the order depends. Entry to the office is by attainment within the monastic order, the upadhyaya being an ascetic recognised for mastery of the texts and appointed to teach them. The office reflects the Jain concern for the accurate preservation and transmission of the teaching, and the upadhyaya, as the one who instructs the ascetics in the scriptures, holds a defined and honoured place among the five supreme beings the daily prayer salutes.

For many centuries after Mahavira, the Jain scriptures existed only in memorised oral form, preserved and transmitted precisely through generations of upadhyayas teaching the texts to succeeding ascetics by recitation rather than through any written copy, a method of transmission that put the accuracy of the entire canon directly in the hands of whichever teachers held it in memory at a given time. Tradition holds that a council held at Valabhi in Gujarat, generally dated to the fifth or sixth century CE, finally committed the Svetambara scriptures to writing, out of concern that famine, war and the simple decline of memorisation were putting the oral tradition at real risk of loss, a transition from memory to manuscript that fundamentally changed, without eliminating, the upadhyaya's role as scriptural teacher.

Jain communities today maintain that teaching function through organised pathshalas, part-time religious schools that instruct children and adults in scripture and practice, and through more advanced training for ascetics under a qualified upadhyaya or acharya, so the office continues to do in a partly institutionalised modern setting what it has always done, transmitting a canon whose survival once depended entirely on precisely this kind of teacher committing it to memory and passing it on intact.