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Lord Mahåvira
issued by three classes of guilds, namely, Bankers, Traders and Artisans. When Fa-Hien visited India (A.D. 399-414), it was an important religious, political and commercial centre: but its fall began in the next three centuries and what Hiuen-Tsang (A.D. 635) saw there was more or less in ruins, and today it is only a neglected village.
The Indian Republic of today has inherited a great deal from the spirit of Vaishali, and the Vajjian concord is the pedestal of our Democracy, apart from the fact that Ahimsa with its corollaries, viz., Panchashilas, is the bedrock on which our policies are built. By adopting Hindi as the State Language, our Central Government is only carrying on the policy of Magadhan Governments which gave more importance to the language of the masses than to that of the classes. The inscriptions of Ashoka are all in Prakrit. Our Late Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, when said that he could find time to meet the humblest in the country even in preference to his big officials easily reminds one of Ashoka, the Priyadarshin, who had a similar dictum. Thus it is but natural that Vaishali can no more be neglected. Thanks to the vigilant eye of the Central Government, patronage of the Bihar government, princely gifts of enlightend industrialists like Shantiprasadji and the active efforts of the Vaishali Sangha with its able workers like Shri J.C. Mathur, Vaishali is rising up again. The Bihar Government have started a post-graduate Institute there for Prakrit and Jaina studies, we have no doubt that the place will become a great centre of learning.
gh the ravages of time and tide, and due to political vicissitudes Vaishali fell into ruins, and we had nearly forgotten its identity. But Vaishali has not forgotten its worthy sons. Among the Jaina and Buddhist relics, the most important remnant is a plot of fertile land, owned by a local significant family of Simha or Natha Ksatriyas, which is never cultivated, as far as the family memory goes, because for generations it is believed in the family that on that spot Mahâvîra was born and hence it is too sacred to be cultivated. It is a remarkable event in the religious history of India that the memory of Mahâvîra is so concretely kept at his birthplace by his kinsmen though more than 2500 years have quietly elapsed.
The period in which Mahâvîra lived was undoubtedly an age
