Kathakoca or Treasury of Stories

Author(s): C H Tawney
Publisher: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation New Delhi

Page 11

ix
which took place in his thirty-first year, he abandoned the world, and became a wandering ascetic. For twelve years he led a life of austerities, visiting even the wild tribe of the country called Rádhá. After the first year he went about almost naked."* He then considered himself a perfected saint. The period of his activity as a religious teacher extended to over thirty years. The sphere of his operations was the kingdoms of Koçala, Videha, Magadha, and Anga, corresponding to the modern Oudh, and the provinces of Tirhut and Behar. He was frequently brought into connection, in the course of his life, with Bimbisára, called Çrenika, and his sons Abhayakumára and Ajátaçatru, or Konika the parricide. He died in Pává or Pápá, the modern Padraona. The date of his death is variously given as 545, 527, and 467 before Christ. In the second century after Mahávíra's death the Jain community was torn by schism, and about the beginning of the first century before Christ it finally split up into the Cvetámbaras, or whiterobed, and the Digambaras, or naked, Jains.§ These distinctions still subsist, though Hofrath Bühler assures us that the Digambaras, or 'sky-clothed,' have been compelled by the progress of civilization to relax in practice the rigour of their theory.
The object of the Jain religion, as of most Indian systems, is to escape from the bonds of metempsychosis, or the never-ending cycle of births and deaths. There is no mention, as far as I know, of metempsychosis in the Rig Veda. But after the joyous Vedic religion had lost its hold on the minds of men, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls began to oppress the philosophical * Jacobi's Introduction to his translation of the Ácháránga Sútra,' See also pp. 79 and ff. of the translation. There his sufferings are most minutely related.
"
p. xv.
Bühler's Vortrag, p. 20.
Ibid., note 15. The last date,' observes Bühler, is certainly wrong, if the view now generally adopted that Buddha died between 482 and 472 B.C. is right, as Buddhist tradition mentions that the Jain Tirthankara died in the lifetime of Buddha. The date generally accepted now is 527 B.C.'
§ Introduction to Hoernle's translation of the p. ix.
Uvásaga Dasáo,'
"