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Lord Mahâvîra
biography,23 which consist of Parshva's Fourfold Restraint along with the avoidance of sexual relations. Yet the Buddhist Pali Canon, albeit not an infallible guide to early Jainism, consistently identifies Nigantha Nayaputta, that is Mahâvîra, with the preaching of a Fourfold Restraint alone.
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A well-known passage in one of the older scriptures of the Shvetambara canon (UttS 23) attempts to explain why there should be a difference between the teachings of the two fordmakers. Keshin, a follower of Parshva, and Gautama, a disciple of Mahâvîra, are depicted as discussing whether the Fourfold Restraint or the five Great Vows represent the true doctrine. Gautama's explanation is that there is a discrepancy in the outward appearance of the doctrine, which is in reality unified, because the moral and intellectual capabilities of the followers of the fordmakers differed. In the time of the first fordmaker there was difficulty in understanding the doctrine which was being preached for the first time, while in the time of the last fordmaker as the process of moral and spiritual decline began to take hold, people had difficulty in putting it into practice. In the time of the twentytwo intervening fordmakers, however, it was possible to both understand what was entailed by the doctrine and put it into practice. In other words, the first and last fordmakers formulated their teachings in the form of the five Great Vows in which prohibition of sexual relations is specifically prescribed as a result of the inadequacies of their followers, whereas such a ban would have been understood by the followers of the other fordmakers as being incorporated in the prohibition on possession. A further form of differentiation is said to be that the male ascetic followers of Rishabha and Mahâvîra were naked, while those of Parshva and the other fordmakers wore clothes.
In 1917, Jugalkishor Mukhtar wrote a paper in Hindi in which he argued, employing Digambara as well as Shvetambara sources, that the fordmakers had not all taught the doctrine in the same manner and that the second to the twenty-third had in fact taught one single restraint of 'equanimity' (samayika), whereas Rishabha and Mahâvîra had been obliged because of the defects of the times in which they lived to specify more precisely the five main areas of moral significance.24 More recently, P.S. Jaini, drawing on research by P. K. Modi, although without any apparent reference
