Mahavira Jain Vidyalay Suvarna Mahotsav Granth Part 1

Author(s): Mahavir Jain Vidyalaya Mumbai
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay

Page 594

JAINISM IN ANCIENT BENGAL : 133
According to Jinadása's detailed itinerary, Mahāvīra, along with Gosāla, visited Rādha twice, as stated above. On the first occasion they were attacked by two robbers in a village called Punnakalasa. On the second occasion they spent the rainy season at Vajjabhūmi, though they were put to great trouble and ignominy by the uncouth people of the locality, as has been described above on the authority of the Acārānga Sutra.
Jinadāsa refers to Rādha as a non-Aryan country, evidently on the basis of an old tradition and with a view to explaining the rudeness of the people. But if we study the itinerary of Gosāla and Mahāvīra as a whole, as described by Jinadāsa, we must conclude that respect and reverence to the ascetics was not yet such an established virtue as we are apt to think today. For Jinadāsa records numerous instances where Gosāla was ill-treated by the local people even in Aryan countries, and sometimes Mahāvīra also shared the sufferings and ignominy with him. Gosāla was beaten by villagers on many occasions and also suffered other ignominies at their hands, while he and Mahāvīra were seized by a village headman, and in another place were suspected as spies and thrown into a well.
With this background in view the reception accorded to the ascetics in Rādha would perhaps appear less strange, and need not be accounted for simply by the assumption that the people of West Bengal were non-Aryan'l and therefore of wild character, though that might be partly or even wholly true, for all we know.
At the same time it is only fair to remember that naked ascetics like the Jainas and Ājivikas must have been repulsive to people of good taste and high culture as well as ordinary men not accustomed to such a practice. According to the Dhammapada Commentary the Buddhist lady Visakhā remarked on seeing an Ajivika : "Such shameless persons, completely devoid of the sense of decency, cannot be
11 But some Jaina texts represent the allied peoples of Arga and
Vanga in a good light. Sylvain Lévi observes: "For the Jainas, Anga is almost a holy land. The Bhagavati places Anga and Vanga at the head of a list of sixteen peoples, before the Magadha. One of the Upāngas, the Prajñāpană, classes Anga and Vanga in the first group of Arya peoples whom it calls the Khettāriya." The list also includes Tāmalitti, i. e., the people of Tāmralipta in West Bengal (Rādha). P. C. Bagchi, Pre-Aryan and Pre-Dravidian in India (Calcutta, 1929), p. 73.