Contemporaneity and Chronology of Mahavira and Buddha

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

Page 78

CHAPTER VI
HISTORIANS' VIEW
Much has been written on the present issue by the Western as well as the Eastern historians. A detailed discussion of all the different views would be too lengthy a task to be discussed in the present treatise. We quote, here a view, which can be regarded as a theme of the present-day historians' approach. In An Advanced History of India, written by the top-most historians of India, Dr. R. C. Majumdar, Dr. H. C. Raychawdhri, and Dr. K. K. Datta, the subject has been elucidated to a great extent. It is to be noted that this work consisting of more than 1100 pages, has been prescribed as a text-book of history for the post graduate studies in almost all the Universities of India. In the first part Ancient India of the above treatise, in the context of Nirvāṇa the authors observe? : The event is said to have happened 215 years before the Mauryas, and 470 years before Vikrama. This is usually taken to refer to 528 B.C. But 468 B.C. is preferred by some modern scholars, who rely on a tradition recorded by the Jain monk Hemacandra that the interval between Mahāvīra's death and the accession of Candragupta Maurya was 155, and not 215 years. The latter date does not accord with the explicit statement found in some of the earlier Buddhist texts that Mahāvīra predeceased Buddha. The earlier date is also beset with difficulties. In the first place it is at variance with the testimony of Hemacandra, who places Mahāvīra's Nirvāṇa only 155 years before Candragupta Maurya. Again some Jain texts place the Nirvāņa 470 years before the birth of Vikrama and