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power. Its original significance may in fact lie in an old Vedic myth in which Indra rips off a wheel from the chariot of the sun and stamps it into the ground. By carrying a mark reminiscent of this cosmic event, Mahâvîrg is shown to be a 'Greai Man' (mahapurusha), assimilated to the ancient Vedic gods.37
It is likely that the development of the view of Mahâvîra as Great an led to, or was accompanied by, a desire to furnish him with a royal genealogy, so that in the Universal History he is presented as related on his mother's side to king Shrenika and his son Kunika, two of the central figures in the rise of the dominance of the slate of Magadha in sixth century BCE (the former being known to the Buddhists as Bimbisara) and both of whom Jain sources claim were devotees of the fordmaker. The attempt found in some texts to link Mahâvîra with the illustrious Ikshvaku dynasty can be regarded as part of the same process. 38 The Conversion of The Ganadharas
According to the Universal History, a remarkable event, peculiar to this avasarpini, happened at Mahâvîra's first samavasarana which took place after his attainment of enlightenment. Only the gods assembled to hear him and so, as they cannot enter the spiritual path, the fordmaker chose not to preach and thus, initially, nobody was converted (AvNiry 564). The Digambaras explain Mahâvîra's unwillingness to preach at this event not as the result of the absence of human beings but, more specifically, because of the lack of disciples (ganadharas), whose function is to interpret and mediate to other people the divine sound (divyadhvani) which the Digambaras claim emanates from Mahâuîra's body when he preaches and which would otherwise be unintelligible.39
There are no significant references to the ganadharas in the early biographical literature. However, the most important of them, Indrabhuti rautama, usually called Gautama, occurs frequently in the 'Exposition of Explanations', as an interlocutor with Mahâuîra and occasionally as a converter of heretics. It is in this text that the fordmaker tells Gautama that the two of them have been bound together in friendship through a series of rebirths and they are now living in their final existence after which they will both be equal in the state of spiritual deliverance (Bh 14.7).40
