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Jaina-Rupa-Mandana Pārsvanātha's attendant Yakșa and Yakşiņi in Jaina iconography are the snake king and queen Dharanendra and Padmavati. Pārsva's birth-place is Vārānasi, and as the legend of the Ganges narrated in the Vasudevahindi shows, the Nāgas lived in the regions through which the Ganges flowed towards the sea, and in the first flow their buildings were often swept away. By the time of Mahavira, the Nāgas were pushed further eastwards and southwards of Madhyadeśa and Magadha.
Nāgas are intimately associated with waters. And as the late Dr. Coomaraswamy has shown, the Yaksas are also similarly intimately associated with water cosmology. 65 As shown by him, the Atharvaveda (X.7.38) referring to Varuna, Brahman or Prajāpati as the supreme and ultimate source of life says: A great Yaksa in the midst of the universe, reclining in concentrated energy (tapas) on the back of the waters, therein are set whatever gods thereby, like the branches of a tree about a trunk. “Significance is to be attached to this concept of the tree of life springing from a navel. For Yakşas are primarily vegetation spirits, guardians of the vegetable source of life, and thus closely connected with the waters."66
He writes, 67 "we have recognised that all these Yaksas, great or small, are vegetal spirits, directly controlling and bestowing upon their bhaktas fertility and wealth, or to use a single word, abundance ... Kubera's inexhaustible treasuries are a lotus and a conch, innumerable Yakṣis have a makara or other fish-tailed animal as their vehicle, Kamadeva has the makara as his cognizance, the greater tutelary Yakşas control the rains essential to prosperity and in the earliest mythology "that germ which the waters held fast, and in which all gods exist", rose like a tree, ''from the navel of the unborn", who in the oldest passage is Varuna and in the Atharva Veda is called a Yakşa; moreover in the Indian "decorative art", vegetation is represented indifferently as springing either (1) from the mouth or navel of a Yakşa, or (2) from the open jaws of a makara or other fish-tailed animal, or (3) from a "brimming-vessel" or (4) from a conch, but never directly from any symbol representing earth ... A priori it might have been supposed that the Nāgas, who are water deities, and who control the activity of the waters, should have been the gods of abundance, but they are not, as the Yakşas are worshipped by those desiring children."
"Closely connected with the water cosmology and with Yakşas, is the idea of the productive pair, mithuna: the prominence of such procreative pairs in later art has been discussed by Ganguly, 68 while in the earlier art, such pairs are constantly recognisable as a Yaksa and a Yakşi, and it may be remarked that the formula appears commonly in Sunga terracottas."69 The most famous of all yaksa pairs is the Buddhist Jambhala and Häriti. Kubera with Hāriti or Kubera with Laksmi, Bhadra or Hariti, assignablo to the Kuşāna age, are obtained from Mathura.70 Kubera or Jambhala and Häriti are also obtained from Gandhara.71 The Sahri-Bahlol sculpture shows Hariti and Kubera with at least five children, one being on the lap of the goddess. The sixth child on the right shoulder of Kubera, corresponding to the one on Hariti is lost. Härīti held in her hand some object which is lost and whose long end alone remains. At Mathura, in the numerous figures of this group, we find that the goddess either shows one hand in abhaya mudrá or carrying a cup. The other hand remains engaged in holding a child.
/In Jaina iconography, before the end of the fifth century A.D., we do not find any attendant yakşa and yakşi accompanying a Tirthankara; nor do we find separate sculptures of any Śāsanadevată which can with confidence be assigned to a period before c. 500 A.D.
A headless statue of Mahāvira in the Lucknow Museum, inscribed and dated in the Gupta year 113, is perhaps the only known Jaina sculpture of the Gupta period, discovered hitherto, which bears a date.72 It does not show the śäsanadevatas on the pedestal. Nor do we find śasanadevatas with the Tirthankara figures on the Kahaon Pillar73 dated in the year equivalent to 461 A.D. A seated figure of Neminatha on the Vaibhāra hill, Rajgir (Fig. 26), bears a fragmentary inscription, in Gupta characters, referring to Chandragupta (the second). This is the earliest known sculpture of a Jina showing the cognizance on its pedestal but the attendant sâsanadevatás are absent.
None of the known Tirtha okara images of the Kuşāna period show on their pedestals either the lañchanas or the attendant yaksa pair, cven though yaksa Kubera and a two-armed yaksi, perhaps a prototype of Ambika, were known74 and were probably worshipped by the Jainas also as yakşa-deva and yakși devi but not as śāsanadevatäs of a Tirthankara.
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