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Lives of great souls became favourite themes of Jaina Purāņas. List of such salākā-puruṣas or mahāpuruṣas include the 24 Tirthankaras + 12 Cakravartins +9 Baladevas +9 Vasudevas 54 mahāpurusas. Later texts speak of 63 salākā-purusas by adding nine Prati-vasudevas (enemies of Vasudevas) amongst the great souls.
Representations of these great men, except the 24 Tirthankaras, are very rare. Only in a few cases, representating incidents from the lives of Tirthankaras, we find some of these figures. Separate images of Bharata are likely to be discovered and the present writer remembers to have seen one such at Satrunjaya more than two decades ago. However two painted wooden covers of some palm-leaf manuscript at Jaisalmer are specially devoted to coloured representations of these great men in a serial order.
The Sthānanga-sutra and other Jaina canons classify gods into four main groups, namely, the Bhavanavasis, the Vyantaras or the Vanamantaras, the Jyotiskas and the Vimanavāsis. These are again sub-divided into several groups with Indras, Lokapālas, Queens of these and so on.
The classification, acknowledged by both the sects is a very old tradition, but these are after all deities of a secondary nature in the Jaina pantheon.
But there were other great souls. The Jainas also evolved a conception of Kulakaras like the Manus of Hindu mythology. They were 14 according to the Digambaras and 7 according to the Svetambaras.
Every sect draws its pantheon from the ancient deities worshipped by the masses and adopts them in a manner suitable to the new environment and doctrines. Such for example was the worship of the deities whose shrines existed in the days of Mahavira and whose images and festivals are referred to in the Agama literature. They include Indra, Rudra, Skanda, Mukunda, Vasudeva, Vaiśramaņa (or Kuvera), Yakṣa, Bhūta, Nāga, Piśāca, etc., Lokapālas and so on.
Indra, the great Vedic deity was assigned the role of a principal attendant of the Jina or the Buddha by the Jainas and the Buddhists. The other deities of the list were mostly deities worshipped by the populace and did not belong to the pantheon of the Vedic priests.
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