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The Fordmakers
and altered modes of social interaction anu authority. However, while the Shvetambara scriptural text, the 'Exposition of Explanations', does preserve a memory of this period in a description couched in mythical terms of two conflicts called 'The War of the Big Stones' and 'The War of the Chariot and the Mace' in which the famous sixth century BCE king of Magadha, Kunika (called by the Buddhists Ajatashatru) destroyed a confederation of smaller kingdoms and tribes (Bh 7.9), early Jain literature shows very little interest in contemporary political circumstances and the question of some kind of psychological malice or sense of anomie as constituting an influence on those who went forth to become mendicant renouncers can only remain hypothetical.
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Nonetheless, there is no doubt that one of the most noteworthy features of world renunciation was its construction of alternative forms of social groupings akin to those of the world which had been left behind. Terms employed in Jainism and Buddhism to describe groups of ascetics such as gana, 'troop' and sangha, 'assembly' are used in early Vedic texts to refer to the warrior brotherhoods, the young men's bands which were a feature of Aryan nomadic life, and the stress found in the old codes of monastic law on requirements of youth, physical fitness and good birth for Jain and Buddhist monks, along with the frequent martial imagery of Jainism and its repeated stress on the crushing of spiritual enemies, may point to a degree of continuity with these earlier types of warrior. Certainly it is noteworthy that both Mahâvîra and the Buddha were members of the warrior caste.8
While the most ancient ideal of Jainism, as represented in Mahâvîra's early asceti career, was isolation and solitude, going forth did not mean entry into an anarchic, unstructured world but rather entailed joining a new form of society with its own rules, internal relationships and groupings which in many respects replicated those of the social word which had been abandoned. The only major difference was the necessity for ascetic society to reproduce itself by means of recruitment and initiation since there was a necessary obligation for all renouncers to abandon sexual activity. One of the most frequently used terms up to about the tenth century CE to describe a Shvetambara monastic group was kula, 'family'.
