Ardhamagadhi

Agreement with both Agent and Object marking is a typologically less common feature of the languages of the world. It is rare in Indo-European/ Indo-Aryan languages. However, it is widespread in many Sino-Tibetan languages including Kiranti, Siberian and Caucasian languages as well. Darai stands out in this respect from other Indo-European languages not only because it has poly-personal agreement where both the subject and the object trigger agreement in transitive clause, but also due to its linear agreement of arguments in terms of person hierarchy. Besides this, it is also unique for hierarchical agreement marking where the highest-ranking non-first person argument triggers the agreement in some persons of the paradigms. This is reported to be an uncommon feature of the languages of the world; and it has not been observed yet in South Asian languages. But it has been reported for a number of Native American languages (Mithun 1991, 1999, Jany 2008).

The puzzling redactorial mosaic presented to us by the first Śvetāmbara canonical text, the Āyāraṃga (“The Section on Conduct”), and particularly the Bambhacerāiṃ, or “The Ascetic Life” (Skt. brahmacārya), the first collection, or suyakkhaṃdha, is an ideal place to look for the diverse, divergent, disconnected, and often difficult to understand instances of which what later becomes a scholastically regimented discourse on time is left unregulated presents itself as a dimly visible constellation of times. This chapter, building on some of the author’s earlier work on the emergence of time as a central and more unified category of Jain thought, will present a close reading of the way praises, exhortations, and prescriptions directed at Jain religious agents, reveal that the linguistic experiences of punctuality or lateness, persistence or evanescence, insistence and deviation, seriality or repetition are ways to orient the monastic performance towards āyāra (Skt. ācāra), or right conduct, in other words instructing in how to properly know what later texts may end up calling time.