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INTRODUCTORY
Brāhmaṇical purānas have treated Rşabha as an early incarnation of the god Vişņu. In the philosophical literature of ancient India, Jainism finds place as an important nonBrāhmanical system.
The Buddhist literary tradition is no less explicit in indicating the prevalence of Jainism in times prior to the rise of Buddhism (6th century B.C.); in fact, the last Tīrthankara, Mahāvīra, was a senior contemporary of the Buddha. Numerous epigraphical records, literary references, monuments and antiquities belonging to subsequent centuries, speak eloquently of the important and major role Jainism has played during the last two thousand and five hundred years in the life and culture of this vast subcontinent.
As regards foreigners, Pythagoras and the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece had certain beliefs and practices in common with the Jainas. Alexander the great is himself said to have come in contact with certain nude Jaina monks. Terms like gymnosoph, gymnosophist, gymnetai and gennoi used by Greek writers beginning with Megasthenes (4th century B.C.) to Hesychois (5th century A.D.), have generally been taken to have referred to the naked Jaina saints of ancient India. The Chinese pilgrims of the 4th to 7th centuries A.D. and the Arab merchants and traders of the 7th to 14th centuries were well acquainted with the Jainas and distinguished them from the followers of Brāhmanism and even Buddhism. The European adventurers and travellers of the 15th to 18th centuries, do not appear to have noticed the distinction between the two communities, the Hindu and the Jaina, because, looking superficially with the eyes of a common lay and stray stranger from far off countries, there was none. The Muslim chroniclers of medieval times also generally suffer from the same lapse, but not all of them. Abul Fazl Allami's account of Jainism in his Ain-i-Akbari is tolerably full and elaborate for such a work.
