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Post-Mahāvīra Period and the Contribution of Jainism
to stay in north India under the leadership of Sthulabhadra. After the end of the famine and restoration of normal conditions, a council was summoned at Pataliputa259, early in the third century BC by Sthulabhadra 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 Pataliputra Council found that the knowledge of the purvas was lost and that nobody except Bhadrabahu, 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 purvas when he was threatened with excommunication. But of the five hundred monks sent to him for the purpose only Sthulabhadra learnt all the fourteen pūrvas from Bhadrabahu.263 But Sthulabhadra was ordered by Bhadrabāhu not to teach the last four purvas to his successors; consequently, their knowledge was lost to posterity.264
The canon fixed by the Pațaliputra 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 purvas was lost for good.265 The Digambaras, therefore, hold that the canon collected by the Pațaliputra 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.
266.
267.
Ibid., p. 19.
AOIU, p. 422.
HJM, p. 19.
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