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Amrita
these two religions stands on a very different footing, and is in no way connected with it. It is yet very difficult to believe that the present ArdhaMāgadhi canon, which tradition itself admits to have suffered much recasting and reduction, and which has the still greater disadvantage of being repudiated by the whole of the Digambara community of the Jains, can be reasonably attributed to a period to which the Pāli canon of the Buddhist is attributed at the latest!. It is true that the Pāli tradition also shows us the Buddhist canon as going through the similar stages of redactions at various stages of its history, but their last council falls in the reign of king Asoka in the third century B. C.?. while the last council of the Jains comes in the fifth century A. D. in the days of the kings of Valabhi?. So if we are to believe in these traditions alone it is clear that the Pāli canon will have to be put much earlier than the Ardha-Māgadhi one.
This problem of the relative priority of the two canons is further rendered more difficult and complicated by the supposition of an ArdhaMāgadhĩ canon earlier than the present one, and a similar canon of the Buddhist which again according to Lüders will have to be supposed to be written in old Ardha-Māgadhī4. All such speculations have no doubt some indications in the present canons themselves and can on, that account be said to rest on facts. In the case of the Jain canon we even possess an outline of the older canon preserved to us with more or less accuracy, while it will be very unwise to put down the whole of the Pāli canon at the time of Asoka. But it is equally true that it is not possible now to separate them from their later additions with anything like certainty. For the present purpose then of comparing a few parallel passages from the two canons it is better to set them aside and to start without the supposition of earlier works not to be found to day, even though the parallels themselves are adduced to prove their existence.
To begin with, we have a number of stories common to the two canons which we take for consideration. Of all the works of the Jain canon the Uttarādhyayana is the most important as it preserves many interesting stories and parables which are also to be met with in various works of the Buddhist. Here we meet the story of the two persons called Citra and Sambhūta who were fast friends at the beginning and wandered a series of lives together but at the end suffered very different fates because of their characters. This story is also found in the Jātaka collections in the CittaSambhūta-Jätaka“. As pointed out by Dr. J. Charpentier the two chapters show similarity not only in the general outline of the story and its main incidents