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( 24 ) article, on page 128, para 2, the writer continues: “It is related of the founder himself the Mahavir that after twelve years. penance he thus obtained Nirvana before he entered upon his career as a teacher.”
The Jains are at liberty to take any view, they please, about the origin of their religion and we do not dispute their view that Mahavira was not the founder of that religion but the 24th and the last Tirathankara, as urged by our critic. But we do not agree with him that it is quite wrong to say as we have said: “We now tell the story of Mahavira who founded Jainism”, because, for all practical purposes, the standard writers on Indian History, if not the Jains themselves, consider Mahavira to be the founder and the greatest hero of Jainism. We have given above two quotations from the Encyclopædia Britanica upon which our critic has also drawn for support ( vide (b) above ). But even this writer, as shown in the two extracts ( ii, above 'taken from the same artical on Jainism-even this writer is unconsciously inclined to accept the view that Mahavira was the founder of the religion.
We give below a few more extracts from standard European writers :
"Mahauira is usually regarded as the real founder of the Jain religion; and as we have very scanty information about the only one of his alleged
