SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The sociology of Indian names is still in its infancy. The present article explores theoretical and pragmatic solutions for two elementary difficulties, faced by all prosopographies and text-encoding initiatives, namely, the creation of standardised lists of names, and the accurate identification of individuals. Its central concern is the analysis of the structure of Jaina names, particularly monastic names, which entail an entire sociology of the Jaina tradition, and require custom-made coding schemes to be accurately represented in a prosopological database. After analysing the classification of name-types in Jaina-scriptures, compared with contemporary semantics and pragmatics, and methodological conundrums of coding Jaina householder and monastic names, a suitable coding scheme is proposed, and a “naming formula” for Jaina monastic “full names” from the perspective of functional grammar. The study will finally show, at hand of the example of the names of Mahāvīra, that problems of identification of individuals on the basis of Jaina monastic names are similar to problems of identification in Jaina biography or the iconography of the Jinas.