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MAHĀVĪRA : HIS LIFE AND TEACHINGS
the stoic or ascetic He made four moral precepts binding upon his followers, precepts which were later enforced by Mahāvira and Buddha'i
As a reformer of Pārsva's religion, Mahāvīra added a fifth, namely, the vow of chastity to the list of four-vows enjoined by his predecessor Secondly, he restricted the practice of religious suicide by slow starvation only to those among his disciples who followed his personal example.
And as a happy result of the amalgamation of the two Orders, the oldest known Jain literature came to consist of the fourteen Pūrvas and the twelve Angas The Pūrvas, as it appears, formed the scriptural basis of the Upāngas and other books of the Jain Canon Similarly Pārsva's doctrine of six classes of living beings served as
the basis of Mahāvira's doctrine of six leśyās HTTs When Pārśva lived Kāśi was probably the most
powerful kingdom in Northern India The un Buddhist Jātakas relate stories of repeated wars C-between Kāśi and Košala, which ended ultimately
in the establishment of the supremacy of the latter kingdom. Both the Jaina and Buddhist sacred books point to a time when there arose
"A History of Pre-Buddhist Indian Philosophy, p 380, Das Gupta, History of Indian Philosophy, Vol I, p. 169.
