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carly Jain Tirthankaras as ‘dim shadowy figures, wrapped up in mythology', but no doubt is now entertained as to the penultimate Tirthankara Pārśvanātba's being a real historical person. He lived in 877-777 B.C. and was a Ksatriya prince of Varanasi, Vardhamana Mahavira (599-527 B.C.), the Nigantha Nataputta of the Buddhist texts was the Jain Tirthankara who reformed the creed, gave it its final shape and reorganised the fourfold order of Jain monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. He was a contemporary of the Buddha and was like him a Ksatriya belonging to eastern India.
In fact, as Jarl Charpentier observes, Jainism "represents, probably, in its fundamental tenets of the oldest modes of thought known to us, the idea that all nature, even that which seems to be most inanimate, possesses life and the capacity of reanimation; and this doctrine the Jains have, with inflexible conservatism, kept until modern time". Similarly, in view of some of the peculiar tenets of Jainism another scholar, Dr. A. N. Upadhye, has advanced the postulate of a 'great Magadha religion, indigenous in its essential traits, that must have flourished on the banks of the Ganges in Eastern India long before the advent of the Aryans into Central India'. It is this stream of ancient Indian culture and religious thought which is known as the Śramaņa and which has been quite distinct from and independent of the only other important stream, usually called the Brahmana or the Vedic. The chief supporters of the former were the Ksatriyas or warrior classes while those of the latter were the Brahmanas. And it is this ancient Sramana stream of Indian culture which motherd and nursed the so-called sister ceeeds, Jainism and Buddhism. It is also very likely that prior to the rise of Buddhism in the sixth century B.C. what is now known as Jainism had been, if not the only, the principal representative of that stream. The Niganthas (Jains) are never referred to in the Buddhist texts as being a new sect, nor is their leader Nätaputta (Mahavira) spoken of as the founder of that sect, whence scholars like Jacobi have plausibly argued that the real founder of Jainism was much anterior to Mabavira and that this religion preceded Buddhism. The great Buddhist scholar Prof. Rhys
