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its pure form. The Jaina concept of Śāsana-devatās or YaksaYaksis is nothing but a Jaina version of Hindu deities. As I have pointed out earlier, the influence has been reciprocal. This can be discerned from the fact that, on the one side, Hinduism accepted Rsabha and the Buddha as incarnations of God, while on the other, Jainism included Rāma and Krsna in its list of Śalākā-purusas.
A number of Hindu gods and goddesses were accepted as consorts of Tirthankaras such as Kāli, Mahākāli, Cakreśvari, Ambika, Padmavati and Siddhika and some others as independent deities such as Sarasvati and Laksmi. It is to be nested that Jainas have included Rama and Krsna in their list of sixty-three great personalities before the 3rd century AD because we have a mention of Krsnain an early canonical Jaina text. Not only this, an epic on the story of Rama was composed in Jaina tradition by Vimalasuri between the 1st to 5th century AD. Similarly the image of the Saraswati (2nd century AD) is found at Kan☐kālī Tīlā, Mathura, which shows that the various Hindu deities were included in Jainism before 3rd century AD.
The moot point I intend to come to is that different religious traditions of our great Indian culture have borrowed various concepts from one another. It is the duty of scholars to study and highlight this mutual impact which is the need of the hour and thus to bridge the gulf that exists between different religious systems due to the ignorance of their interactions and the history of mutual impacts. Though it is true that Śramanic tradition in general and Jainism and Buddhism in particular have some distinct features, discriminating them from the early Vedic or Brahmanic tradition, yet they are not alien faiths. They are children of the same soil, and they came forward with a bold
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Jainism and its History
