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Lord Mahâvira
Both of these books originated from about the fifth or fourth centuries BCE, although a slightly earlier dating cannot be ruled out, and they represent the most ancient stratum of Jain textual material.
The second book of the Acaranga, which is of particular importance since it presents (AS 2.15) Mahâvîra's life as a totality for the first time, is accepted by the commentators as being later than the first book. It can perhaps be assigned to the second or first centuries BCE and to a second stratum of biographical material, as can the Kalpasutra (KS), whose name relates to the monastic ritual (kalpa) which forms one of its main themes. It is the Kalpasutra which, as well as providing an extended biography of Mahâvîra, albeit one which concentrates on the events which led up to his birth, for the first time links the last fordmaker with a chain of twenty-three predecessors and gives very short accounts of the lives of three of them, Rishabha, Nemi and Parshva.
Still more difficult to date is the voluminous 'Exposition of Explanations' (Vyakhyaprajnapti), usually referred to by Jains as Bhagavati, 'Revered' (Bh). This contains a great deal of disparate material about Mahâvîra, his career and teachings, disciples and relations with other holy men, especially Makkhali Gosala who is not mentioned in the earlier scriptures. However, this is unquestionably a composite text and it is difficult to be confident about which portions of it are genuinely old and which originated nearer to the Council of Valabhi, although it can provisionally be taken as falling within the second stratum of the biography. The Aupapatika (Aup), which takes its name from the spontaneously born (aupapatika) gods and hellbeings described in the text, can probably, on the grounds of its often highly ornate prose style, be dated to the early centuries of the common era when such a mode of literary diction was emerging in Sanskrit and Prakrit belles-lettres and thus be provisionally located within a third biographical stratum. Most important of all for the literary expansion of Mahâvîra's biography and for the development of the Universal History as a whole is the commentarial literature which came to cluster around the Avashyakasutra, the canonical text describing the six Obligatory Actions (avashyaka) incumbent upon every ascetic (see Chapter 6). The earliest portions of this material are the Prakrit mnemonic verses (niryukti) which perhaps date from about the second or third century CE, while the Prakrit prose commentary of Jinadasa
