Kalaha Preaches to King Sahr; Mahavira’s Departure with Indra (top); Adoration of a Tirthankara (bottom)

The Kalpasutra (Book of Ritual) is a major canonical text that provides an extended biography of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism. It is the principal text of the Svetambara Jains, rulers of the Gujarat state in western India and committed art patrons. Because the commissioning of a Jain text for a temple library was deemed an act of religious merit, probably the more closely a copy resembled previous versions, the more ritually correct it was thought to be. This accounts for the stylistic unity found in several fifteenth-century Jain manuscripts displayed here.