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11
Bhagavan Buddha
and Bhagavan Mahavira
Three stages of their biographies
While considering the biographical accounts of Buddha and Mahāvira, it will be noticed that they have passed through many stages. The trend and tilt of the life-history of both of them is the same in the oldest scriptures of the Jainas and Bauddhas, namely the Sūtrāgama and Pitaka respectively, while the same is different in the Jaina commentaries and biographies so far as Mahavira's life is concerned as also Atthakathā and Budhacarita of the Mahāyāna branch so far as Buddha's life is concerned.
The First Stage The account of Mahavira's life and Buddha's life which is found there in the Jaina canon and Pitaka respectively reveals how the spiritual progress of a man reaches a climax after having passed through hardships and struggles. A common man also is able to understand from those books how an ordinary man becomes extra-ordinary and thus gets inspiration. But the life-stories of both of them change their tenor in the subsequent period after they became the acknowledged leaders of the religious systems founded by them. The accounts of both of them found in the Jaina canon and Pitaka respectively belong to the same period in the cases of both and therefore it can be said that poetic imagination bad no role to play there. But as times of biographies differed in due course, the concept of a biography also underwent modification. This made room for sectarian tinge.
Between the first and the subsequent stages, the fundamental change in the biographies of Buddha is obvious but not so as regards those of Mahavira. The reason of this is to be found in the fact that nothing worth noting relating to the details about the life of a Tirthankara took place in the approaches of different sects. But concerning Buddha's life, it can be stated with fair amount of exactness, that the material widely differed with the
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