Jain Journal 1979 10

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

Page 23

JAIN JOURNAL
and enshrined them for worship in a caitya (temple) in the heaven of the thirty-three gods.
This narrative reads like an expansion of the legend briefly told in the Lalitavistara and the Mahāvastu, and illustrated in a bas-relief on one of the pillars of the southern gateway (c. 50 B.C.) of the great stūpa of Sanci, 2 and in a panel on a corner pillar of the great rail of the stūpa of Bharhut (c. 125 B.C.). The term cūdāmaha, "worship of hair", not only occurs in the inscription on the Bharhut rail pillar, but also in the Lalitavistara and the Mahāvastu. But this legend is unknown to the Pali Nikāyas and must have originated after their compilation. In the life of Vipassi in the Mahāpadanasutta of the Digha Nikāya, the framework of which is the common factor of the biographies of all the Buddhas including Gautama, it is narrated that when the future Buddha (Bodhisattva) was driving in a chariot towards the park he saw a shaven-headed (bhandu) man, a pravrajita (wanderer) wearing yellow robe. When the Bodhisattva was told by the charioteer who the shaven-headed man was and had a talk with the latter, he said :
“Come then good charioteer, do you take the carriage and drive it hence back to my home? But I will here cut off my hair and beard (kesamassuṁ otāretvā), and don the yellow robe, and go forth from home to homelessness."4
A somewhat different story is told of the renunciation of the Bodhisattva Gautama in four of the suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya (Nos. 16, 36, 85 and 100). The charioteer and the shaven-headed monk in yellow robe have no place in the narrative. We are simply told :
“There came a time when I, being quite young, with a wealth of coalblack hair untouched by grey and in all the beauty of my early primedespite the wishes of my parents, who wept and lamented-cut off my hair and beard, donned the yellow robes and went forth from home to homelessness.”5
* Sir John Marshall, A Guide to Sanci, Calcutta, 1918, p.51, pl.vi b. : Coomaraswamy, History of Indian and Indonesian Art, London, 1927, pl.xii,
fig.44; Bachhofer, Early Indian Sculpture, Paris, 1929, pl. 24. · Digha Nikaya (P.T.S.) vol. II, p.28; Dialogues of the Buddha, translated by T.W.
and C.A.F. Rhys Davids, pt. ii, London, 1910, p.22. 5 Majjhima Nikaya, (P.T.S.), vol. I, pp.163, 240; Vol. II, pp.93, 212; Further
Dialogues of the Buddha, translated by Lord Chalmers, Vol. II, London, 1926, p.210.
Vol. 4, pp.93, 212; Further