Jinamanjari 1996 04 No 13

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 77

Sravanabelagola, Karkal, Venur, etc. One may wonder if a later day Jaina iconographic pose such as kayotsarga could have appeared as early as the Harappan or Mohenjo-Daro times (third millennium B.C.). Surely the conceptions of absolute nudity and inner abandon of all physical consciousness for the realization of the Jaina fundamental doctrine of ahimsa can lead only to one pose.
It is this pose that we find at Harappa in the statuette being described here. There is thus a continuity and unity in this ideology and there are no other iconographic details in the statuette to confuse, or lead us astray. Also the nude pose is in strict contrast to the Vedic description of their god Mahadeva Rudra Pasupati as urdhva-medhra, the pose in which we find him depicted on the steatite seal of MohenjoDaro (Cambridge History of India, 1953: pl. XXIII).
The chronology and hierarchy of the series of twentyfour tirthankaras do not stand in the way of the date of the Harappa statuette. In the present list of tirthankaras, we know that Mahavira was the last and a contemporary of Buddha in the sixth century B.C.E. Parsvanatha, the twenty-third tirthankara, lived approximately one hundred years before Mahavira; and Neminatha, the twenty-second tirthankara, was a cousin of Krishna of the Bhagavadgita.
Recent excavations at Hastinapura (near Meerut), the cradle of the activities of the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, has given a date of occupation between 1100-800 B.C. We have yet to account for the twenty-one tirthankaras that precede Neminatha. If we push back the dates proportionately to each tirthankaras, we are led hypothetically to find the first tirthankara Adinatha (also called Rsabhanatha, Rsabhadeva) standing on the threshold of the last quarter of the third millennium B.C.E. The Harappa statuette has been assigned by the critics a date between 2400-2000 B.C.E.
That the first tirthankara Adinatha is significant, for the riks of the Rig Veda are fond of repeating that it was Rsabha
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