________________
Post-Mahāvīra Period and the Contribution of Jainism
to stay in north India under the leadership of Sthūlabhadra. After the end of the famine and restoration of normal conditions, a council was summoned at Pāțaliputa259, early in the third century BC by Sthūlabhadra to collect and co-ordinate the extant portions of the canon, because famine conditions had perhaps made it impossible for the monks to recollect and study their texts properly.260
The Pătaliputra Council found that the knowledge of the pūrvas was lost and that nobody except Bhadrabāhu, who was practising austerities somewhere in Nepal, knew them.261 The council requested him to reveal his knowledge to others, but he refused to do so.262 He agreed to teach the pūrvas when he was threatened with excommunication. But of the five hundred monks sent to him for the purpose only Sthūlabhadra learnt all the fourteen pūrvas from Bhadrabāhu.263 But Sthūlabhadra was ordered by Bhadrabāhu not to teach the last four pūrvas to his successors; consequently, their knowledge was lost to posterity. 264
The canon fixed by the Pāțaliputra Council was rejected by the monks who returned to north India from the south. They held that the entire group of the angas and the pūrvas was lost for good.265 The Digambaras, therefore, hold that the canon collected by the Pātaliputra Council was not genuine. It is not possible to know the exact nature of the canon that was settled by the Pataliputra Council,266 it appears that it could collect only the angas and the ten pūrvas. 267
259. HJM, p. 18; LDJC, p. 32; AOIU, p. 422; CMHI, II, pp. 357-8. 260. Ibid., pp. 18-19. 261. Ibid., p. 19; LDJC, p. 32. 262. Ibid., p. 19. 263. Ibid.; LDJC, p. 32; AOIU, p. 422. 264. Ibid.; Ibid.; Ibid. 265. Ibid., p. 19. 266. AOIU, p. 422. 267. HJM, p. 19.
