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Lord Mahavira
the division into Svetambaras and Digambaras which was not the result of a single period of conflict. The Buddhists, on the other hand, knew of schisms in their own community, arising soon after the Master's death and resulting in the development of the new religion of the Mahayana. They did not realize that Mahâvîra was not the founder of a new religion, but merely the reformer of that of Parsva, so that on Mahâvîra's death no catastrophe was possible. The Buddhist account, therefore, in the three Suttantas is based on erroneous assumptions and was evoked by dogmatic needs.
This interesting suggestion rests on a very unsound basis. It assumes that the Buddhists believed that a formal schism or a catastrophe afflicted the Jain congregation on the death of Mahâvîra. But this is much more than we can justly deduce from the Buddhist statements. All that is said is that there arose disputes, division, and a wordy warfare in the community and that the lay followers were disgusted with the monks. Not a suggestion is made of a real schism or catastrophe, and there seems no reason whatever to suppose that the Suttantas intended to assert that such a schism occured. Moreover, it seems hard to accept the view of the paucity and lateness of schisms in the Jain community. The evidence is that Mahavira was much troubled by the rivalry of Gosala, whether we regard him as strictly within the Jain community or not," that in his fourteenth year of power his son-in-law, Jamali, raised opposition to him, and persisted in opposition to his death, while two years after Jamali's revolt, Tisagutta stood out in opoosition.12 Moreover, the divergence between Svetambara and Digambara is fundamental, as is fully recognized by Jains at the present day, so that it was certainly unnecessary for Buddhists to go to their own experience to find justification for the belief in divergence within the Jain community. There is, in fact, nothing whatever to suggest that Buddhist tradition was wrong in asserting that Mahavira's death caused commotions in the Jain community. To judge from the bitter feud between Mahavira and Gosala and from the revolts of Jamali and Tisagutta, not to mention the defection of Upali, we may take it as certain that the community was far from being in ideal unity of heart. The argument that there could be no schism, because (1) Mahavira was the child of parents who were adherents of
