Is There a Jain Way of Thinking? Poesis and Ethics in Somadeva’s Yaśastilaka

This paper examines two literary ornaments from Somadevasūri’s Yaśastilaka–the śleṣopamā or punned simile and the virodhābhāsa or seeming contradiction–to explore the capacity of the poem to produce an ethical subjectivity, cultivated as much through comprehension as through its productive absence. The devices present similar hermeneutic challenges; they frustrate readerly expectations in yielding multiple layers of disjunctive meaning that are juxtaposed without resolution. Thus, the devices force the cultivation of an ethical orientation that defers complete understanding, either provisionally or indefinitely, while at the same time entertaining multiple simultaneous orders of existence. These devices give proof of the astonishing heterogeneity of phenomenal existence and provide a means of coping with it, without diminishing the surfeit of sense that the phenomenal world presents. Thus, each act of understanding, as evinced by these passages, consists of apprehending the sense of an utterance and holding the residue of meaning that resists apprehension.