Religion and Culture of the Jains

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

Page 39

HISTORY OF JAINISM AFTER MAHĀVĪRA
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Most of the places of pilgrimage, festivals and fairs, as also several important religious texts, are still common, and till about the beginning of the medieval period of Indian history (about the 10th century A.D.), temples and images had also been common and made alike. The ascetic orders have no doubt differed in some of their outward practices and usage, but so far as the laity is concerned there outward practices has hardly been any noticeable distinction. Again, not all of the denominational sects or subsects which saw their rise in the Jaina fold after the nirvāņa of Mahāvīra have survived; many of them were short-lived. Spread and Expansion
Modern historians, even those who admit the historicity of Pārsva and seem to concede that Jainism must have existed not only before Mahāvīra, but, perhaps, even before Pārsva, usually begin the account of the progress and gradual diffusion of this religion with the last Tīthankara. They are often found making statements such as: in the beginning Jainism was confined to the five cities of Rājagțha, Vaiśālī, Mithilā, Campā and Śrāvastī, or to the countries of Magadha, Mithilā, Anga and Kosala, which is almost the same thing; that Mahāvīra and his monks did not travel beyond Sthūņa in the west, AngaMagadha in the east, Kuņāla in the north, and Kausāmbī in the south, that is, roughly the modern States of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh of the Indian Union; or that this religion went out of its centre in eastern India to certain other parts of the country through migrations of Jaina monks spread over sevaral centuries.
Such inferential statements, though presumbly based on certain Jaina texts themselves, are self-contradictory and misleading. They should, in fact, be taken to refer only to the missionary activities of the monks of the new Jaina Order (sangha) as reorganised and re-established by Mahāvīra, for the propagation of the creed as revived and reformed by him, and not