Religion and Culture of the Jains

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

Page 38

24
RELIGION & CULTURE OF THE JAINS
latter seem to have taken the cue to start, on their return to Mathurā, the Sarasvatī movement for the redaction of the surviving canon and the production of book literature. The result was that, within a period of two hundred years or so, those who came to be called the Digambaras redacted important portions of the original canon preserved in their circle and also compiled a fairly large number of treatises directly based on the original teaching of the Lord, having, therefore a quasicanonical significance. Pre-eminent among these pioneers were Bhadrabāhu II, Kundakunda, Gunadhara, Dharasena and Umāsvāti. The other section, which came to be known as the Śvetāmbara, continued to resist attempts at redaction for several centuries more.
About the beginning of the fourth century A.D., its gurus convened for this purpose two councils simultaneously, one at Mathurā and the other at Valabhi (in Saurashtra), but it was only about the middle of the fifth century A.D. that they, under the leadership of Devarddhi-ganin, finally succeded in redacting whatever portions of the canon, and in whatever from, had survived in their own circles. These activities of the pioneers of the two sister communities opened the gates for a flood of exegetical literature and numerous independent works on diverse subjects, religious as well as secular, written in several languages prevailing in different parts of the country, during the last two thousand years.
With the passage of time, both the communities have continued to develop, almost independent of each other, into a number of sects, subsects, divisions and subdivisions, evolving the respective rituals, usages and practices. Yet, there are no fundamental doctrinal differences between the two principal sects, the Digambara and the Svetāmbara, at least no more than there are between the Brāhmaṇical Saivas and Vaisnavas, the Buddhist Mahāyānists and Hinayānists, the Christian Protestants and Roman Catholics or the Muslim Shias and Sunnis, rather they are less marked.