Taylor, McComas2019-09-252019-09-252013-12-1720111748-1074http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/197961For over a hundred years, it has been assumed that the collection of Sanskrit narrative fables known as Pūrṇabhadra’s Pañcatantra was a Jaina text. For the last thirty years or so, one could assume that because the redactor inhabited a specific epistemic community, the Jaina ‘thought-world’, that this was not only obvious, but inevitable. This paper challenges both these assumptions, and will set out to demonstrate that the Pūrṇabhadra’s Pañcatantra is a product of a Brahminical, Hindu, episteme, and that the redactor, rather than being a trapped in the imaginary of Jaina society draw on the epistemic traditions of his choice. This will contribute to our understanding of pre-modern literary production, the Jaina thought-world and the workings of epistemic communities more generally. This article demonstrates that a Jaina is capable of producing a non-Jaina text. This might seem obvious, but it challenges our assumptions about the production of discourse in a given epistemic community.engCreative Commons Copyright (CC 2.5)JainismReligious ethicsArticle