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PREFACE.
THE insertion of a Jaina text in the publications of the Pâli Text Society will require no justification in the eyes of European scholars. For them all Jaina documents would have an interest of their own, even if they did not throw a light on the times, or the moral and intellectual world, in which Buddha lived. But it is possible that Buddhist subscribers, who aid our labours by their accession to the Pâli Text Society, and by the interest they show in it, might tako umbrage at the intrusion, as it were, of an heretical guest into the company of their sacred Suttas. Yet if they look him attentively in the face, they will find there many traces that will interest them strongly, though they may not come to like them. The Nigantha Nâtaputta was, it is true, an opponent, if not an enemy, of Gotama the Buddha. Still he was one of his contemporaries; and in the writings handed down amongst his successors and followers there are treated nany of those questions and topics for which the superior renius of Buddha found the solutions which still form the enets of the Buddhist Samgha in Burma, Siam, and Ceylon. Besides this, though the Pitakas frequently mention the Tiganthas, yet they do not clearly describe the institutes nd tenets of that sect, which played so conspicuous a part uring the times of the carly rise of Buddhism. A Buddhist
