________________
S. P. SINGH
125
of Vasukunda, about 3 miles to the north-east of Basādh (ancient Vaiśāli) in the Muzaffarpur District.
It may be pointed out in this connection that sometime in 1890, V.A. Smith visited the village of Baniya and is said to have discovered two statues of the Jain Tirthankaras about 500 yards to the west of the village ;31 but the images were untraceable at the time of Bloch's visit to the village ten years after the former. Thus Bloch writes, “It is a remarkable fact that the modern site of Vaiśāli, the traditional birth place of the last Tirthankara of the Jainas, Vardhamāna Mahāvira, is entirely devoid of any remains belonging to his religious order”. 82
Strangely enough there is no archaeological evidence of the existence of old Jain remains in the locality of Vasukunda and it never became a place of pilgrimage for the Jains to rank
it with the Pārasnāth hill and Pāvāpuri $8 Except for strong literary evidence, there is nothing to support that Vasukunda was the birth place of Mahāvira.34 Curiously enough, the Jains forgot their real tradition and the location of the birth place of their prophet.
Rājgir, as we have seen above, was the chief centre of Jainism during the life time of Mahāvīra. According to both the Svetāmbara and Digambara texts Vardhamāna Mahāvīra spent the major part of his life at Rājgir, and his eleven chief disciples called gañadharas died there. 'In the preamble of many of the dialogues of Vardhamāna contained in the Svetāmbara Jain canon, he is shown as living in the Guņaśila or Guņa
31 JRAS, 1902, p. 149. 32 ASI, AR, 1903-04, p. 87; Thakur, op. cit., p. 99.
33 The Svetämbara text Tirthamālācaityavandana (17th century), which gives 76 names of the ancient Jain tirthas, does not speak of Vaiśālī or Kundapura (Thakur, op. cit., p. 149).
34 The Digambara Jains identify Kundapura or Kundalapura, the traditional birth place of Mahāvīra, with Kundalpur near Nālandā in the Patna District (K. Bhujabali Šāstri, in Jain Siddhānta Bhāskara, Vol. 1). D. 60) and the Svetāmbaras with the village of Lachwad or Lachuar in the Monghyr District. See Thakur, op. cit., p. 149.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
