[2] It tells the stories of the lives of a group of souls as they pass through a series of embodiments on their way to final liberation from the continual cycle of death and rebirth.
The purpose of these stories, which are related to Queen Līlāvatī and her husband King Sinha by the teacher-monk Samarasena (Samara-sena), is to promote the ethic of Jainism, which holds that strict adherence to a nonviolent way of life is the key to liberation from the troubles of the world.
The primary purpose of Jain narrative literature was to edify lay people through amusement; consequently the stories are racy, and in some cases the moralising element is rather tenuous.
There developed a genre of soul biography, the histories, over a succession of rebirths, of a group of characters who exemplified the vices of anger, pride, deceit, greed and delusion.
Jinaratna's Līlāvatī-Sāra: A Sanskrit Abridgement of Jineśvara Sūri's Prakrit Līlāvaī-Kahā edited by H.C. Bhayani, Ahmedabad, 1983: L.D.