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224 INDIA. AS DESCRIBED IN EARLY TEXTS
*Sanjaya were the most notable of the class.
Their movements were restricted more or less to the Majjhimadesa. Apart from the Brāhmana Paribbājakas, the Pali texts repeatedly speak of the six influential orders of Samanas, the leaders of whom were known to the Buddhists as six titthiyas or leading thinkers: Pūraņa Kassapa, Makkhali Gosāla, Pakudha Kacoāyana, Ajitakesakambalī, Sanjaya Belatthaputta or Belaţthiputta, and Nigantha Nātaputta 1. Of them the sixth was no other than Mahavira, the reputed founder of Jainism. Sañjaya, as his name implies, was a Khattiya of the Belattha clan or one born of a princess of the Belaţtha family. The remaining four were Brahmins by birth. They too by their habits of life were all wandering teachers, shavelings and mendicants and differed from the Paribbājakas as a class only in their attitude towards the world and the existing social and religious institutions. Pūraña as a transcendentalist claimed that the soul (atta) cannot be affected by the moral or immoral action of men. Gosāla was, according to one of the Jain traditions, the son of a Brahmin Paribbājaka couple, and according to another, the son of a Brahmin who was rich in cattle (gobahula). He was pre-eminently a Kosalan teacher. Philosophically he was a determinist
* Digha, i, p. 47£.; Kern, Manual of Indian Buddhism, p. 32f.
