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The Fordmakers
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to Mukhtar's work, has attempted to explain this problem in rather similar terms. Starting with the premise that Mahâvîra must have been initiated into the same ascetic vows as his predecessor Parshva, Jaini points to the common occurrence in both Shvetambara and Digambara literature of references to the samayika as representing the sole vow which Mahâvîra took at the time of renunciation and suggests that Parshva's Fourfold Restraint in fact related to the four modalities of the body (mind, body, speech and senses) while Mahâuîra's Great Vows were simply slightly different articulations of the same basic ethical and sensory equanimity. 25
Leaving aside the difficulties that the modalities of the body are traditionally regarded as being three26 and that none of the sources adduced concerning the single samayika can be located in the earliest stratum, this explanation has considerable merit. However, the criticism must remain that it derives from an insistence, difficult to sustain on a purely textual basis and deriving in the last resort from traditional Jain belief, that there was some kind of formal link between Parshva and Mahâuîra.
The 'Exposition of Explanations' is the best source for the relationship between Mahâvîra and contemporary followers of Parshva. Mahâuîra is portrayed in one passage as converting Parshvite monks by enunciating cosmological views which he describes as having already been taught by Parshva whom he. refers to with respect. However, the conversion of these monks, is effected by their abandoning the Fourfold Restraint and taxing the five Great Vows: there is no suggestion that the two are parallel expressions of one single vow of renuciation (Bh 5.9).27 Elsewhere, an elaborate description of the mechanism of rebirth is affirmed to be both based on Parshva's teachings and at the same time a truth which Mahâvîra had established for himself through his omniscience (Bh 9.3).28
It is impossible to be certain about the relationship between Mahâvîra and Parshva. What can be stressed is that all biographies of Mahâvîra portray him as, unlike all other fordmakers, renouncing the world alone (AvNiry 224-5) with only the gods in attendance, and there is never any suggestion that he entered an already existing ascetic corporation. A tentative explanation might therefore be that early Jainism coalesced out of an interaction
