Religion and Culture of the Jains

Author(s): Jyoti Prasad Jain
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

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RELIGION & CULTURE OF THE JAINS
this event is ascribed the large-scale migration of the members of the Jaina sangha (ascetic order) to regions lying south of the Vindhyas, especially Karņāțaka. Their descendants, a few centuries later, began to claim themselves as belonging to the Mula sangha (the original order) and call themselves Digambara (sky-clad, or naked), in order to distinguish themselves from the ascetics of the other section, who had begun to cover their bodies partly with a piece of white cloth, hence called svetāmbara (sveta=white; ambara=cloth). The latter represented those who had stayed behind in Magadha in spite of the famine. By the third or second century B.C. they, too, nad to emigrate, going first to Ujjain in Central India and then further went on to Saurashtra and Gujarat which thereafter came to be their chief strongholds. The separation of the Digambara from the Svetāmbara became complete, final and irrevocable, it is said, in 79 A.D. (or 81 A.D.). There was also a third section of the community, the Yāpanīya, the gurus of which tried for centuries to bring about a reconciliation between the two divergent sects, though without success. Similarly, since about the close of the Maurya rule (circa 200 B.C.) to that of the Gupta (circa 500 A.D.), a period of some seven centuries, Mathurā was prominent centre of Jainism and a veritable meeting place for the different sections of the community. Its gurus developed their organisation independent of all the others, yet acted as a unifying force for them and several of them have been owned equally by both the sects. The Jaina establishment at Mathurā centred round the great Jaina stūpa there, which even about the beginning of the Christian era was believed to have been built by the gods and is supposed, by archaeologists and orientalists, to have been at least as old as the time of Pārsva (8th century B.C.). This site has, during the last one hundred years or so, yielded an unprecedented wealth of about two thousand years old Jaina epigraphical records, sculptures and other antiquities.