Doctrine of Jainas

Author(s): Walther Shubring, Wolfgang Beurlen
Publisher: Motilal Banarasidas

Page 59

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF JAINISM
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$23. The most easily accessible source for the remotest history of the Jain Church is Hemacandra's Parıśıstaparvan laid down between samvat 1216 and 12291. But Hemacandra naturally goes back to older sources comprising not only such in the Āvassaya literature and in other comments on the Canon, but also in the Vasudevahindia (6th century A.D. at the latest). Here already we find the sequence of the lords spiritual being linked with that of the lords temporal. Thus it is said to have happened 60 years after Mahāvīra's death that the son of his protector named Kūniya or Ajātasatru, King Udāyın of Magadha, was murdered and followed by Nanda becoming the head of a new line (since 9 of this name are known) (Par. 6, 243), We do not come across any date before Nanda's fall (155 after Mv., Par. 8, 339) caused by Cānakya in favour of Candragupta. C.'s son, Bindusāra, as well as his grandson, Aśoka, and the latter's son, Kunāla, and grandson, Sampratı, appear within the frame of the Par., which mixes the anecdotical and the historical in the well-known way. The history cf the Jain Church goes as far as to Vajra Svāmın to whom Āv. 764-773 refer in all sorts of things, as it does to his successor, Arya Raksita.
Sayyambhava, by the way of raśobhadra and next to Sambhūtavajaya (sb), is followed by Bhadrabāhu Belonging to the 6th generation since Mv. or Goyama, resp , he lived in the 2nd century after them at the latest, 1 e , in the 3rd century BC. He died 170 (thus Par 9, 113) or 162 ycars (thus the Dig. tradition) after Mahāvila In the Theiāv. we have apart from the "shorter” list of names a more "compiehensive's ones which by starting from Bhadrabāhu lists the male and female disciples of every Ganahara, the gana founded by them. their sāhā (sākhā), and (from Suhastin onward) also their kula. It may well be assumed that this list, on the whole, can be relied upon, since in locally confined regions it is confirmed by inscriptions, as first
I BÜHLER, Leben Hc's p 43 2 Comp the proof furnished by JACOBI, Sthav (2nd ed ) p v ff
3 For their relation to each other and other lists of teachers in the Nandi and the Āvassayanijjuttı see JACOBI loc cit S XIII ff One of the results is (XVIII) that only a few of the thera that have actually existed have survived by name