Article: Story of Yaśodhara

Yaśodhara performs the sacrifice
Image by Wellcome Trust Library © Wellcome Library, London

Yaśodhara goes to his mother Candramatī for help, saying that he wants to die because of a bad dream. He is about to commit suicide in front of her.

Candramatī promises to help by sacrificing a cockerel to the goddess Caṇḍamārī. Yaśodhara refuses this idea because he does not want to commit any violence.

Then his mother proposes making the sacrifice with a cockerel made of flour instead of a living bird. Yaśodhara accepts this suggestion.

They have a very lifelike cockerel made out of flour. Then they both go to the temple and perform the sacrifice.

Amṛtamati kills Yaśodhara and Candramatī
Image by Wellcome Trust Library © Wellcome Library, London

Yaśodhara is still full of disgust at his wife’s betrayal. He decides to give the kingdom to his son Yaśomati and renounce worldly life.

His wife Amṛtamati puts on a show of great sadness. She pretends that she will accompany her husband in entering religious life.

Queen Amṛtamati invites Yaśodhara and Candramati to a final feast, where she serves them poisoned food. Candramati dies instantly.

While Yaśodhara lies on the ground in agony, Amṛtamati throws herself on him, weeping as if overcome with grief, and kills him.

Unaware of how they have died, Yaśomati performs funeral rites for his father and grandmother and becomes the king.

Peacock attacks Amṛtamati
Image by Wellcome Trust Library © Wellcome Library, London

Sacrificing a flour animal is a sin because, even though it is not a living being, the worshippers treat it as one and thus they commit a kind of mental violence.

As a result of their shared sin, the souls of both Yaśodhara and Candramati endure several rebirths. To a large extent, these rebirths run in parallel and their past link continues over their new lives. In several cases, they also come across King Yaśomati, their son and grandson respectively, although they cannot identify each other.

Tortures in the hells
Image by British Library © CC0 1.0 (Creative Commons Public Domain)

One day King Yaśomati goes on a hunting expedition and on the way he passes a Jain monk named Sudatta. The king returns later without any game and again meets the Jain monk. Yaśomati concludes that the monk is a bad omen and sets his dogs to attack him. But the dogs stand still with their heads bent. The angry king then wants to kill the monk with his sword, but is stopped by a merchant devotee.

Yaśomati learns that Sudatta was a former king who has renounced the world to atone for the sin of punishing an innocent person. King Yaśomati is impressed and so ashamed of his behaviour that he wants to kill himself.

The mendicant guesses his thoughts and stops him.

Yaśomati then asks Sudatta where his father, mother and grandmother are.

The monk answers: “Your father, Yaśodhara, and your grandmother, Candramati, have been reborn as your children, Abhayaruci and Abhayamati. Your mother, Amṛtamati, has been reborn in the fifth hell, as a punishment for her vicious behaviour.”

King Yaśomati renounces the householder life and becomes a monk.

Abhayaruci and Abhayamati recall their earlier lives when they hear the monk’s words and faint. When they regain consciousness, they too want to become mendicants. But as they are very young Sudatta advises them to become junior mendicants – kṣullakas.

Jina statues at Gwalior
Image by z4n0n1 © CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

On JAINpedia, the story of Yaśodhara is represented by the Wellcome Trust manuscript Beta 1471, which has been fully digitised. It contains the version of the story by the poet Raidhū, called Jasahara-cariu. A Digambara Jain of the 15th century, when large parts of the subcontinent were under the Mughals, he mainly lived in Gwalior – in present-day Madhya Pradesh – in the reigns of the Tomara kings, Ḍūṃgarasiṃha and his son Kīrtisiṃha.

Raidhū is known to have supervised about 1500 carvings of Jain idols on the outer walls of the Gwalior fort. Raidhū was closely connected with the Jain authorities and prominent personalities. One of these was Hemarāja, whose name appears in the colophons at the end of each section of his poem on Yaśodhara. He was Raidhū’s childhood friend and a prominent Jain devotee who gained the title of sanghapati – ‘leader of the community’. A member of the Agrawal caste, he was one of Raidhū’s protectors.

Raidhū wrote numerous narrative and didactic poems, mainly in Apabhraṃśa, a late form of Prakrit used extensively by Jain Digambara authors from the ninth century onwards. At the time Raidhū wrote, India was under Islamic control, yet the languages used were forms of the modern languages of northern India such as Old Hindi, Old Rajasthani or Old Gujarati. But Apabhraṃśa was still a literary language favoured by poets and scholars.

Yasodhara and Amṛtamati in love
Image by Wellcome Trust Library © Wellcome Library, London

The Story of Yaśodhara is one of the most important sources for Jain illustrated manuscripts created by Digambaras. However, the style of art depends on the region and on the time the paintings were completed.

There is no date for the incomplete Wellcome Trust manuscript, but it is likely that it goes back to the 18th century, like the Beawar manuscript which is so close in style. Both have colourful and lively scenes, where the figures are proportional and realistic.

See Doshi 1985, Garg 1991 and Jain (1974: 601ff.) for more details.