Agam aur Tripitak Ek Anushilan Part 1

Author(s): Nagrajmuni
Publisher: Concept Publishing Company

Page 9

Foreword
Muni Shri Nagarajaji is a well-known author. He possesses a first hand knowledge of Jainism and of the Jaina way of life. He has a scholarly temper and an earnest desire to widen the horizon of his studies and the boundaries of his knowledge. He passionately pursues the Anuvrata ideology with a view to making it intelligible to others, in comparison with modern ideas as well as in the back-ground of Jainism. He is one of those few authors who have tried to study Jain concepts in the light of modern science.
Shri Nagarajaji's present work Agama aur Tripitaka: Eka Anusilana (in Hindi) is, as indicated by its title, an exhaustive study of the Agama, also known as Ganipitaka, of the Jainas and the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, putting together some common topics on which our attention is being focussed, Buddha and Mahavira have been great contemporaries; and, as the Tripitaka reveals, there were other teachers in that as such as Purna Kasyapa, Makkhali Gosala, Ajitakesa Kambala, Prakudha Katyayana and Samjaya belattha Putra. The Jain canon also gives a few details about them. Gosala was a remarkable saint of that age; but, unluckily, his doctrines have not come down to us by themselves. We do not possess any scriptures of the Ajivaka system: all that we know about it is from the Jaina and Buddhist sources. Muni Shri Nagarajaji gives exhaustive details about these teachers and their tenets.
It is well-known that there is plenty of disparate evidence and conflicting traditional information as well as a plethora of controversy amongst scholars about the dates of the Nirvana of Buddha and Mahavira. Shri Nagarajaji has surveyed, in this respect, all the accessible material and different traditions, specifying dully the sources etc., and his conclusion that Mahavira attained Nirvana in 527 B.C. and Buddha in 502 B.C. seems to be quite consistent in itself. Then he presents the lives of Mahavira and Buddha in their various aspects and