Jainism

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

Page 24

JAINISM
9
though the personality is practically ignored.
Before him, 1,200 years, we are told, was the twenty-third of the Tirthamkaras, and then, 84,000 years before Him, the twentysecond and so on backwards and backwards in the long scroll of time, until at last we come to the first of These, Rishabhadeva, the father of King Bharata, who gave to India its name. There the two faiths, Jainism and Hinduism, join, and the Hindu and the Jaina together revere the Great One who, giving birth to a line of Kings, became the Rishi and the teacher.
When we come to look at the teaching from the outside — I will take the inside presently — we find certain canonical Scriptures, as we call them, analogous to the Pitakas of the Buddhists, fifty-five in number; they are the Siddhānta, and they were collected by Bhadrabāka, and reduced to writing, between the third and fourth centuries before Christ. Before that, as was common in India, they were handed down from mouth to mouth with that wonderful accuracy of memory which has ever been characteristic of the transmission of Indian