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Jinas and Avtars
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compassion, illustrated in a story of him taking pity on a god who had tried in vain to distract the Jina from meditation.
There are further praises of the Tîrthankaras, and prayers: ‘Purify us, protect me, prepare liberation for us quickly, spread endless world; set my mind on Dharma, give me strength for the crossing of existence. Homage to you, compassionate one. 10
Jinas And Avatars
A further Indian sect, contemporary with Jainism and Buddhism was that of the Ajivikas, whose history and doctrines have been pieced together by A.L. Basham. Much of what is known about them comes from Jain and Buddhist sources, which combated them as deterministic and extremely ascetic. Buddhist descriptions place three Ajivikas in the highest rank, but according to the Jain Bhagavati Sutra the Ajivikas believed in twenty four Tîrthankaras, of whom their current teacher Gosala was the last. It seems unlikely that the Ajivikas, who believed in immensely long cycles of ages, would be content with only three Tirthankaras, and since their origins were close to the Jain they probably shared their belief in twenty-four."
Mahâvîra among the Jains, and Gautama among the Buddhists, were the last of a long series. This showed that the Dharma was eternal, not invented by anybody. But in practice it was the present Jina and Buddha who was the pattern for all the rest, and so there is a unity under the apparent diversity, and a virtual uniqueness. So for the Ajivikas Gosala was treated with the greatest respect and was considered omniscient, and Basham speaks of his 'divine status' and the application to him of the word tevan, 'the God'. Yet their Tîrthankaras were not so far removed from the Ajivikas as they were to the Jains; they appeared from time to time, as unexpectedly as the rainbow, and were believed to return to earth when their doctrine was in danger. It seems that at least one school of the Ajivikas believed in occasional Avatars, brilliant and sudden theophanies of a god, and they had an elaborate worship with costly ceremonies. The eventual decline and disappearance of the sect may have been due to the attraction of a number of its followers into the worship of Krishna
The Tîrthankaras of Jainism were not Avatars in the sense of incarnations of God in the world, as in Vaishnavism. The theory
