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Varadhamāna's own attitude towards non-violence including his foodpreference thus is very clear and beyond the pale of doubt. The doubt, of course, has been cast in the past because of an episode figuring in a work that was composed about five to six centuries posterior to the Jina's time. I have in mind the well-known and tragic episode of Gośālaka-Mahāvīra encounter included in the conglomerated corpus of the anga-āgama work, the Vyākhyāprajñptı13, the subsequent (may be consequent) visitation of a serious ailment, and the Jina, for curing it, permitting himself non-vegetarian food intake. Much discussion had ensued on this knotty point and a separate long paper is needed in view first of the ancient writings and next reviewing their controversial interpretations done by various scholars, Western and Indian Jaina, and the positions they had adopted on this issue. In any case, this late record of an anecdote cannot prejudice the position clarified and established by his own utterances of conviction and admonition. Annotations :
1.
After carefully studying the language, form, content, and style of its different chapters and the strata within each chapter, I have fixed the above-cited temporal bracket for the Acāranga Book 1. Vardhamāna's own words is the oldest component therein and must go to c. B.C. 507-477, provided the nirvana of the Jina occurred in B.C. 477 as Jacobi had determined several decades ago.
All of them recognize that, the āgamas inherited (not composed) by and preserved in the Svetāmbara sect, even when these are of differing dates, revealing as they also do strata and laminae in their fabric and are thus neither homogeneous nor of the same period, nor are they complete nor well-organized, they still happen to be sufficiently ancient and by and large authentic. It is too well-known a fact that the Digambara sect, having its origin and earliest prevalence in ancient times in extreme South, lost the āgamas (which must then be in primordial shape and style) at a very early date and at much later dates had composed other works labelled by the German Jainologists as 'secondary,' 'substitute,' or 'surrogate' canon and by the present day Svatāmbara sub-sects as āgamavat or āgamasthāniya (isoāgamic). In its corpus, the surrogate canon has very few works, a couple of works from among them relating to karma-prakrti are the earliest and apparently had derived from those of the Pārsvāpatya sect : these may have been borrowed/adopted from the Yāpanīya sect. Some texts like the Arādhanā of Sivārya, Mūlācāra of Va-kere, and even plausibly the Triloka-prajñpti are the borrowals from the Yāpaniya sect. For the discussion on the historical origin and date of the different
3.
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