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RELIGION & CULTURE OF THE JAINS
the basis of the Jaina purāņic literature. The biggest, and most important of the five sections, however, was the Pūrva-gata (lit., coming down from yore) which comprised the fourteen Pūrvas and is presumed to have been much older than Mahāvīra himself.
In fact, the bulk of the twelfth anga represents that part of Jaina religious lore which was not only pre-Mahāvīra and pre- Buddha but was contemporaneous with the Vedic and later Vedic literature of the Brāhmanical section of the Indian community. Professor E. Leumann described this pre-Mahāvīra "Śramanic literature' as the parivrājaka literature, the term parivrājaka meaning a wandering recluse, and Dr. M. Winternitz as the 'ascetic literature'.
The latter scholar observes: "It is a general habit among writers on Indian literature to describe everything that is not either Buddhist or Jaina literature as 'Brāhmaṇic.' Now, I do not think that this terminology does justice to the facts of Indian literary history. In Buddhist texts we constantly read of 'Samaņas and Brāhmanas', just as Asoka in his inscriptions speaks of SamaņaBambhana', and as Megasthenes makes a clear distinction between “Brāhmaṇas' and 'Sramaņas'.
“This shows clearly that at least four or five centuries before Christ there were in India two distinct classes of representatives of intellectual and spiritual life. And I believe to have shown that these two classes of intellectual have each developed a literature of their own. Even before there was such a thing as Buddhist or Jaina literature, there must have been a 'Samana literature besides the 'Brāhmaṇic literature'. Numerous traces of this Samaņa literature are to be found in the epics and the puāraņas. "Its characteristic features are the following: It disregards the system of castes and aśramas; its heroes are, as a rule, not gods and Rşis, but kings or merchants or even Sūdras. The
