24 Facts About Yashovijaya

Yashovijaya, a seventeenth-century Jain philosopher-monk, was an Indian philosopher and logician.

Yashovijaya was a thinker, prolific writer and commentator who had a strong and lasting influence on Jainism.

Yashovijaya was a disciple of Muni Nayavijaya in the lineage of Jain monk Hiravijaya who influenced the Mughal Emperor Akbar to give up eating meat.

Yashovijaya is known as Yashovijayji with honorifics like Mahopadhyaya or Upadhyaya or Gani.

Yashovijaya was born in a village called Kanoda in the Mehsana district in Gujarat in 1624 CE.

Yashovijaya lost his father when he was very young and consequently he was brought up by his mother.

Young Yashovijaya attracted attention of Jain monk Nayavijayaji who was impressed by his impressive memory feat of remembering the Bhaktamara Stotra at a very young age.

Yashovijaya was initiated as a young monk under the stewardship of Muni Nayavijaya.

Yashovijaya became skilled in the field of Navya-Nyaya branch of logic and thus earned the titles Upajjhaya, Nyayavisharada and Nyayacarya.

One of the decisive events in the process leading to this transformation was Yashovijaya's meeting with Anandghan, a Jain spiritual poet and monk.

Yashovijaya was a prolific writer and is said to have authored around 100 works in Sanskrit and Gujarati.

Yashovijaya often refers to the 8th Century Jain scholar-monk Acarya Haribhadra in his works, indicating that he saw himself as Haribhadra's successor.

Yashovijaya had not only studied all the great Svetambara authors from the oldest to the latest, he was well read in important Digambara works.

Yashovijaya wrote several important Navyanyaya works on Digambara Nyaya texts such as the Aptamimamsa of Acarya Samantabhadra.

Furthermore, Yashovijaya he was well versed in philosophy of diverse schools such as Vedantic, Sankhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Buddhist.

Yashovijaya stresses that neutrality is not an end in itself, but a means to another end.

Yashovijaya describes the state of true self-awareness as a state beyond deep sleep, beyond conceptualisation, and beyond linguistic representation, and he says that it is the duty of any good sastra to point out the existence and possibility of such states of true self-awareness, for they cannot be discovered by reason or experience alone.

Yashovijaya argues that from the standpoint of niscaya naya the soul is called jiva if it leads an embodied life.

Yashovijaya stressed that neutrality does not mean acceptance of every position whatever, but acceptance only of those that satisfy at least the minimal criteria of clarity and coherence needed to legitimately constitute a point of view.

Yashovijaya confronted the Brahmin scholar Raghunatha Siromani, one of the greatest exponent of modern logic during his time, thus proving his extraordinary talent.

Paul Dundas notes that, Yashovijaya criticized the famous Digambara Jain monk Kundakunda for his more reliance on one standpoint.

Yashovijaya strongly attacked the laity based Adhyatmika sect whose de-emphasis on the role of rituals and ascetics was derived from works of Kundakunda and his commentators.

Yashovijaya left behind a vast body of literature that exerted a vast influence on the Jain philosophy.

Dundas notes that Yashovijaya enjoys a near talismanic figure for the contemporary Svetambara monastic community and is identified with madhyastha or principle of neutrality.