The Sacred Inscribed: Navigating the World of the Kalpa Sūtra in Jain Religious Life

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents Corbet Costello, from Hamilton College. 

This talk examines the Kalpa Sūtra, an ancient Jain scripture that has been widely transmitted through the centuries in the form of richly illustrated manuscripts. For more than a millennium, this text—more than any other sacred document in the tradition—has been ritually reproduced, worshipped, and studied by both monastics and lay devotees. Drawing on his dissertation research, Professor Costello focuses on the salvific sponsorship, ritual performance, and exegetical engagement with the Kalpa Sūtra by members of the Mūrtipūjaka (“image-worshipping”) sect of Jains.

Within this Mūrtipūjaka context, he reconstructs the long history of the scripture’s reproduction and reception, considering its influence on Jain social, scholastic, and spiritual life. Taken together, his work highlights how these practices positioned the Kalpa Sūtra as a dynamic site for inscribing the sacred across textual, visual, and ritual domains of the Jain tradition. To further illustrate these dynamics, Professor Costello guides viewers through a Kalpa Sūtra manuscript, attending to its textual, material, and visual features to demonstrate how the document was used, interpreted, and valued.

This event is co-sponsored by Departments of Religion and of Art and Music Histories.

Corbett Costello is a visiting assistant professor in the Asian Studies Program at Hamilton College, where he leads the college’s first Hindi-Urdu language program. In addition to language instruction, he teaches courses on South Asian literature, religion and ecology. He holds a B.A. in art history from the University of Texas at Arlington, an M.A. in South Asian studies from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in South Asian languages and literature from the University of Washington. His research focuses on the intersections of Jain literary history, language practice and manuscript culture, with special interest in the patronage, production and performance of texts.