Gaina sutras

Author(s): Hermann Jacobi
Publisher: Clarendon Perss

Page 33

INTRODUCTION.
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books, show that the Gainas did possess an interest in the history of their church. I do not deny that a list of teachers may be invented, or an incomplete one filled up or made pakka, as the Hindus would say; the necessity of proving itself to be legitimately descended from a recognised authority may induce a sect to invent the names of a line of teachers. But what could have caused the Gainas to fabricate such a detailed list of teachers, Ganas, and Sâkhâs as that in the Kalpa Sûtra? Of most of the details the Gainas of later times knew nothing beyond what they found in the Kalpa Sûtra itself,-and that is unfortunately very little,-nor did they pretend to anything more. For all practical purposes the short list of Sthaviras, as it stands in the Kalpa Sûtra, would have been sufficient; the preservation of the detailed list, containing so many bare names, proves that they must have had an interest for the members of the early church, though the more accurate knowledge of the times and events chronicled in that list was lost after some centuries.
However, it is not enough to have proved that the Gainas, even before the redaction of their sacred books, possessed the qualities necessary for continuing their creed and tradition, and preserving them from corruptions caused by large borrowings from other religious systems; we must also show that they did do what they were qualified to do. This leads us to a discussion of the age of the extant Gaina literature. For if we succeed in proving that the Gaina literature or at least some of its oldest works were composed many centuries before they were reduced to writing, we shall have reduced, if not closed, the gap separating the prophet of the Gainas from their oldest records.
The redaction of the Gaina canon or the Siddhânta took place, according to the unanimous tradition, on the council of Valabhi, under the presidency of Devarddhi. The date of this event, 980 (or 993) A.V., corresponding to 454 (or 467) A. D., is incorporated in the Kalpa Sutra (§ 148). Devarddhi Ganin, says the tradition, perceiving the Siddhânta in
1 It is possible, but not probable, that the date of the redaction fell sixty years later, 514 (527) A. D.; see Kalpa Sûtra, introduction, p. 15.