Last of the 14 dreams

Unusually, this single scene takes up nearly three full pages of the manuscript.

This is the third page, on which are two objects in individual panels. The heap of jewels and a smokeless fire represent the last two dreams.

A woman lies on a richly decorated couch at the bottom. She is the brahmin lady Devānandā.

This page and the previous two pages represent the 14 dreams that were dreamt by Devānandā, who bore the embryo of Mahāvīra before it was transferred to the kṣatriya queen, Triśalā. The embryo Mahāvīra was transferred by Hariṇaigameṣin, the commander-in-chief of the god Śakra. Śakra ordered him to do this because Jinas cannot be born of a brahmin mother. These dreams announce the Jina’s great destiny.

The first six dreams are on one page while the next six dreams are on the following page of the manuscript.

This is a painting in popular style.

Other visual elements

This manuscript is different from the mainstream Kalpa-sūtra manuscripts from Western India, which in style are thought of as more suitable as religious objects.

This example represents a more popular style very different from the usual artistic canon.

Script

The script used for the text is the Jaina Devanāgarī script. It is used for writing numerous Indian languages, here for Prakrit and Gujarati.

There are a few notable features of this script:

• it is an old type in the way the sounds e and o are notated when used with a consonant, known as pṛṣṭhamātrā script
• the red vertical lines within the text divide the long sentences into smaller parts, but are not necessarily punctuation marks.

The larger size script is used for the Prakrit text of the Kalpa-sūtra, the smaller size for Gujarati explanations of words and phrases.