Notes on Modern Jainism

Author(s): Mrs Sinclair Stevenson
Publisher: Oxford

Page 20

MODERN JAINISM
and organised an order of ascetics in the lands under the sway of his royal kinsfolk, in Srāvasti, Videha, Magadha and Anga (the modern Oudh and the provinces of Tirhut and Bihār)," the very countries traversed by his great rival Buddha. During the rainy seasons he would cease from his peregrinations, lest he should injure any of the abundant life then springing into being, staying for four months in some town. Twelve rainy seasons he passed thus in his own town of Vais'āli.
He gained eleven disciples who remained true to him, and they in turn instructed 4,200 monks.
His great disciple Sudharmā survived him; it is through him that Jainism itself has been preserved, and he hands down in the Sutrakṣitānga many of the discourses of his master.
The Kalpa Sutra records with curious iteration the death of Mahāvira in his seventy second year. He spent his last rainy season in the town of Pāpāpuri (probably the modern Padraona, as General Sir A. Cunningham thinks) and at the time of early morning, in king Hastipāla's Office of the Writers, sitting in the Sam paryanka posture and reciting the fifty five lectures which detail the results of Karma, he“ died, went off, quitted the world, cut asunder the ties of birth, old age and death ; became a Siddha, a Buddha, a Mukta, a maker of the end to all misery." +
Mahāvira must have been a man of strong personality to have done the work he did amongst his warrior kinsfolk; but ho never seems to have had the same personal magnetism
* Bühler, Indian Sect of the Jainas. p. 27. + S. B. E, xxii. 264.