Jain Stupa and Other Antiquities of Mathura

Author(s): Vincent A Smith
Publisher: Vincent A Smith

Page 23

( 6 ) Bühler has emphasized the lesson taught by the Mathurâ discoveries that Indian art was not sectarian. All religions, Buddhist, Jain, and Brahmanical, used the art of their age and country, and all alike drew on a common store-house of symbolic and conventional devices. Stapas, sacred trees, railings, wheels, and so forth, were available equally to the Jain, Buddhist, or orthodox Hindu as religious symbols or decorative elements.
The discoveries have to a very Inrye extent supplied corroboration to the written Jain tradition, and they offer tangible incontrovertible proof of the antiquity of the Jain religion, and of its early existence very much in its present form. The series of twenty-four pontiffs (Tirthamkaras), each with his distinctive emblem, was evidently firmly believed in at the beginning of the Christian era.
The inscriptions are replete with information as to the organization of the Jain church in sections known as guna, kula, and sakha, and supply excellent illustrations of the Jain books. Both inscriptions and sculptures yive interesting details proving the existence of Jain nuns, and the influential position in the Jain church occupied by women.
Dr. Führer ("Progress Report" for 1890-91, page 13) states that in all 110 Jain inscriptions were collected at Mathura.
Most of those found in 1889 came from the central temple in the mound. The inscribed images dated V. S. 1038 and 1134 (Plates XCV and XCVI) are quoted by Dr. Fuhrer as proving that this central temple belonged to the Svetambara sect, but I notice that the images are nude.
The finds of 1890, he says, chiefly come from the second Jain temple, which according to a Nagari inscription, was still in the hands of the Digambara sect as late ns V. S. 1080, A. D. 1023.2
According to Dr. Führer the mound also contained remains of a Buddhist vihara and of a Vaishạnva temple. Some of the sculptures depicted in this work may belong to Buddhist or Brahmanical buildings, but most of them are certainly Jain. A few of the objects illustrated seem to have been included by mistake in this collection, as they came, according to the labels affixed to them, from places in Mathurâ distant from the Kankali mound. The supplementary plates are from photographs supplied by Mr. Mukherji.
Baba P. O. Mukherji, who recently visited the spot, roports that it is now impossible to identify with certainty the site of other tom ple. This inscription has not been edited.