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ARHAT PĀRSVA AND DHARANENDRA NEXUS: AN
INTRODUCTORY ESTIMATION
M. A. Dhaky
As is well known, it was thanks mainly to the pioneering efforts and consequent findings of Hermann Jacobi that the originality, antiquity, and distinctness of the Nirgrantha religion vis-à-vis the Buddhist, and, together with it, the historicity of Arhat Pārsva—regarded in the tradition as the 23rd Jina in succession-was unequivocally established in Western scholarship. On the 22 Jinas who are believed to have preceded Pārsva, it was largely left to the Indian Nirgranthologists to search out data (which may have bearing upon their identification) in the early Brahmanical and Buddhist literature and speculate about their historicity and, as its consequence, make a few tentative suggestions. The concept of the 24 Jinas, however, does not appear in the earliest Nirgrantha āgmas which, alone of the two surviving major Nirgrantha sects, were inherited by and preserved in the Svetāmbara sect of the Northern tradition. With the sole exception of the Isibhāsiāiñ (compiled c. 2nd-1st cent. B.C.), 4 even Pārśva finds no mention in the earliest āgmas, such as the Acārānga and the Sūtrakrtānga, which doubtless had originated in, and embody the doctrines and monastic discipline adopted and advocated by the sect of the last Tīrthankara, Arhat Vardhamāna. Arya Syāma I (c. 1st cent. B.C.-A.D.) of the Northern Nirgrantha (probably alpacela) tradition, who is reported to have composed, along with three other works, a work on the biographies of the 24 Jinas (and other legendary and quasi-historical great personages), called the Prathamānuyoga, in which very probably for the first time the concept of the 24 Jinas apparently had figured. His second work, the Gandikānuyoga, is also said to have contained some account concerning the same subject. All subsequent accounts on the lives of the 24 Tirthankaras plausibly were based on these two primordial works that were, to all seeming, lost several centuries ago. The Sthānānga and the Samavāyānga, which in their present enlarged version presumably were finalized at the Mathura Synod (A.D. 363), possibly, indeed largely, had used Arya Syāma's works as sources for the biographical details, of course mostly mythical, of the Jinas including Pārsva.? The "Jinacaritra" section of the Paryusanākalpa (A.D. 503/516), in turn, may have depended on the above-cited two āgmas for some traditional notings on Pārsva, which in any case,
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