Religious Problem in India

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophist Office Adyar

Page 53

JAINISM
45
Hinduism, join, and the Hindū and the Jaina together revere the great One who, giving birth to a line of Kings, became the Rshi and the Teacher.
When we come to look at the teaching from the outside I will take the inside presently we find certain canonical Scriptures, as we call them, analogous to the Pițakas of the Buddhists, forty-five in number; they are the Siddhanţa, and they were collected by Bhadrabāka, and reduced to writing, between the third and fourth centuries before Christ. Before that, as was common in India, they were handed down from mouth to mouth with that wonderful accuracy of memory which has ever been characteristic of the transmission of Indian Scriptures. Three or four hundred years before the reputed birth of Christ, they were put into writing, reduced, the western world would say, to a fixed form. But we know well enough it was no more fixed than in the faithful memories of the pupils who took them from the teacher; and even now as Max Muller tells 11s, if every Veda were lost they could be textually reproduced by those who learn to repeat them. So the Scriptures, the Siddhanta, remained written, collected by Bhadrabāka, at this period before Christ. In 51 A. D. a Council was held, the Council of Valabhi, where a recension of these Scriptures was made, under Devarddigamin, the Buddhaghosha of the Jainas. There are forty-five books, as I said; 11 Ingas, 12 Upāngas, 10 Pakinnakas, 6 Chedas, 4 Mula-Sūtras, and 2 other Sūtras. This makes the canon of the Jaina religion, the authoritative Scripture of the