Jain Journal 1974 04

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 63

APRIL, 1974
201
of Ceylon, it is said that the king Pandukabhaya who ruled in the beginning of second century after Buddha, from 367-307 B.C. built a temple and a monastery for two Nirgranthas. The monastery is again mentioned in the same work in the account of the reign of a later king Vattagamini, cir. 38-10 B.C. It is related that Vattagamini being offended by the inhabitants, caused it to be destroyed after it had existed during the reigns of twenty-one kings and erected a Buddhist Sanghārāma in its place. The latter piece of information is found also in the Dipavansa of more than a century earlier. 32
None of these works can indeed be looked upon as a truly historical source. There are, even in those paragraphs which treat of the oldest history after Buddha's death, proofs enough that they simply hand down a faulty historical tradition. In spite of this, their statements on the Nirgrantha, cannot be denied a certain weight, because they are closely connected on the one side with the Buddhist canon, and on the other they agree with the indisputable sources of history, which relate to a slightly later period
The first authentic information on Vardhamana's sect is given by our oldest inscriptions, the religious edicts of the Maurya king Asoka, who, according to tradition was anointed in the year 219 afte: Buddha's death, and as the reference to his Grecian contemporaries, Antiochos, Magas, Alexander, Ptolemaeus and Antigonas confirms,-ruled, during the second half of the third century B.C. over the whole of India with the exception of the Deccan. This prince interested himself not only in Buddhism, which he professed in his later years, but he took care, in a fatherly way, as he repeatedly relates, of all other religious sects in his vast kingdom. In the fourteenth year of his reign, he appointed officials, called law-superintendents, whose duty it was to watch over the life of the different communities, to settle their quarrels, to control the distribution of their legacies and pious gifts. He says of them in the second part of the seventh 'pillar' edict, which he issued in the twentyninth year of his reign : “My superintendents are occupied with various charitable matters, they are also engaged with all sects of ascetics and householders ; I have so arranged that they will also be occupied with the affairs of the Samgha ; likewise I have arranged that they will be occupied with the Ajivika Brahmans ; I have arranged it that they will
32 Turnour, Mahavamsa, pp. 66-67 and pp. 203, 206 ; Dipavamsa Mahavamsa, XI, 14 ;
comp. also Kern, Buddhismus, Bd. I., S. 422. In the first passage in the Mahavamsa, three Niganthas are introduced by name, Jotiya, Giri, and Kumbhanda. The translation incorrectly makes the first a Brahman and chief engineer.