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THE TWENTYFOUR TĪRTHANKARAS
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laity, men and women including a fair number of the members of important royal families dignitaries and opulent bankers, traders and businessmen.
The texts of the Buddhist canon describe Mahāvīra as 'a notable personality', 'a leader of thought', 'the head of an order, of a following, the teacher of a school, well krown and of repute as a sophist, revered by the people, a man of experience who has long been a recluse, old and well-stricken in years'. The phrase 'well-striken in years' is interpreted as signifying that he was a senior contemporary of the Buddha.
In fact, the middle of the first millennium before the birth of Jesus Christ, was an age when the atmosphere of almost the entire civilized world was surcharged with an unprecedented intellectual activity: Pythagoras and the Ionic philosophers in Greece, Moses in Asia Minor, Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius and Lao-tse-tung in China, the sages of the Upanişads and the founders (Kapila, Kaņāda, Jaimini, etc.) of the socalled six schools of orthodox Brāhmaṇical philosophy, all appear to have been more or less contemporaries in that wonderful age. And it was just then that a belief, current in the Sramana and Vrātya circles of eastern mid-India expected and keenly awaited the appearance of the last Tīrthankara. No wonder that more than half a dozen eminent teachers, belonging to the śramaņa fold, claimed that honour. However, Mahāvīra the Jina and Gautama the Buddha outshone them all, and as soon as Mahāvīra started preaching people had no doubt in their minds that he was the long-awaited Tīrthankara. The Buddha, who was junior to Mahāvīra in age as well as prophetship, had, it is said, great respect for the Tīrthankara and did not openly preach as long as the latter lived.
As we have seen, Mahāvīra was not the founder of a new religion, what he did was only to reform and elaborate the prevailing creed handed down through a succession of previous
