The Met has a page from a Kalpa Sutra, copied in Gujarat in the 1400s. It’s a long, narrow sheet of paper, about eleven centimetres by twenty-seven, written on both sides in black ink with red marks between the phrases. There’s no picture on it. The Kalpa Sutra is a Jain scripture, and the copies were often richly painted, but this page is all text. The record calls it a page from a dispersed manuscript, which means the rest of the book is somewhere else, or in pieces in many places.

The first thing you see is the red circles. On one side there are three: one in each margin and one in the middle of the text, where the lines break around it and carry on. On the other side there’s just one, in the middle.

They’re where the holes used to be. Before paper reached western India, books there were written on strips of palm leaf, and the strips were kept in order by a cord threaded through holes in the middle of each one. Paper doesn’t need a cord. The scribes switched to it, kept the long narrow shape of a palm leaf, and kept marking the spot where the hole would have been, as a painted circle. A lot of paper copies of the Kalpa Sutra have them, sometimes drawn as diamonds. It’s the same thing as a save button drawn like a floppy disk: the old way stops being needed, and the shape of it goes on being copied.

The text is Prakrit, in a Jain form of the Nagari script. I can’t read it fluently, but the script is close enough to modern Devanagari that I could pick out phrases, and the Kalpa Sutra repeats itself in a way that helps. Halfway down one side, between two red bars, is तेणं कालेणं तेणं समएणं, teṇaṃ kāleṇaṃ teṇaṃ samaeṇaṃ: “at that time, at that moment.” Episodes in the book open with it. And the name that comes after it, more than once on this page, is समणे भगवं महावीरे, the ascetic, the venerable Mahavira.

This page is in the middle of the strangest part of his story. As the Kalpa Sutra tells it, Mahavira was first conceived by Devananda, a Brahmin woman. Shakra, the king of the gods, saw this and decided a Jina should be born into a royal family, not a priestly one, and sent a god called Harinegamesi to move the embryo, at night, into the womb of a queen, Trishala. The top line of this page has Harinegamesi going back to report: सक्कस्स देविंदस्स देवरन्नो, “to Shakra, the lord of the gods, the king of the gods.”

Lower down, the text gives the date, and it’s very exact. It happened in the third month of the rainy season, in the fifth fortnight, on the thirteenth day of the dark half of the month Ashvina, after eighty-two days and nights had passed. I could read बासीइ, bāsīi, eighty-two, and तेसीइमस्स, of the eighty-third. Someone reading this copy wanted it even clearer. In the left margin, under the red circle, a smaller hand has written seven short lines in Sanskrit explaining the words of the date. “Vāsāṇaṃ”: the rainy season. Ashvina is the third month. “Bahula”: dark, the dark half. The scripture is in Prakrit, and this reader explained it in Sanskrit, the language commentaries were written in. It’s a crib, left in the margin for whoever read the page next.

Between the report and the date is the part I keep coming back to. It begins तिन्नाणोवगए, tinnāṇovagae, “possessed of three knowledges.” Then, as far as I can make out: साहरिज्जिस्सामि त्ति जाणइ, “‘I will be moved,’ he knew.” And a few words on, साहरिए मि त्ति जाणइ, “‘I have been moved,’ he knew.” In between is a third clause that I can’t read cleanly in this hand. The translations I could reach give the whole thing like this: he knew that he was to be moved, he knew that he had been moved, and he knew not when he was being moved.

The same three-part sentence comes earlier in the book, about the moment he first came down into Devananda: he knew he would descend, he knew he had descended, he did not know when he was descending. So it isn’t a slip. It’s said twice, about the two great changes before his birth, and both times the gap is in the same place. Before, yes. After, yes. During, no.

I went looking for how the commentators explain that gap, and didn’t find it in anything I could reach. I have a guess, and it’s only a guess: that it isn’t about what he could know but about what there was to know. Before the move there’s a state, and after it there’s another, and the move itself is the border between them. It doesn’t last long enough to be a state, so there’s nothing to be in.

What I like is that the page agrees with the text without meaning to. Over a century or two, the scribes of western India moved from palm leaf to paper. Somewhere in that, there was a first scribe who held a page without a hole in it and painted the circle anyway. If anyone wrote down when, I haven’t found it. What’s left is the before and the after: a red circle on paper, sitting where a hole used to be, which is a way of saying “I have been moved.”