Contemporaneity and Chronology of Mahavira and Buddha

Author(s): Nagrajmuni, Mahendramuni
Publisher: Today and Tomorrows Book Agency

Page 30

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Mahāvīra and Buddha
the Jain religion. According to Dr. Rhys Davids, a distinguish scholar, who carried out a first rate research on the Buddhist literature, however extensive the delineation of Ajātšatru in the Buddhist Pițakas may be, it only proves that he was a mere sympathizer of Buddha, and not a follower. Ajātsatru had once called on Buddha and asked him what the fruits of monkhood were ?! With reference to that event Rhys Davids writes. At the close of the discourse the king is stated to have openly taken the Buddha as his guide in future, and to have given expression to the remorse he felt at the murder of his father. But it is also distinctively stated that he was not converted. There is no evidence that he really, after the moment when his heart was touched, continued to follow Buddha's teaching. He never, so far as we know, waited again either upon the Buddha, or upon any member of the order, to discuss ethical matters. And we hear of no material support given by him to the order during the Buddha's lifetime.
“We are told however, that, after the Buddha's death, he asked (on the ground that he, like the Buddha, was a Kșatriya) for a portion of the relics; that he obtained them; and built a Stupa or burial-mound over them. And though the oldest authority says nothing about it, younger works state that on the convocation of the First Council at Rajagraha, shortly after the decease, it was the King who provided and prepared the hall at the entrance to the Saptaparņi cave, where the rehearsal of the doctrine took place. He may well have thus showed favour to the Buddhists without at all belonging to their party. He would only, in so doing, be following the usual habit so
1. Digha Nikāya Samannya-phal Sutta, 1-2. 2. Buddhist India, pp. 15-16.