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AUPAPATIKA SUTRA (OVAVAIYA SOYA)
73
in their ideal aspect. The queens of king Kūņiya were all well-accomplished ladies and perfect beauties. The king himself was endowed with all good qualities and bodily perfections to be installed, hailed and obeyed as the rightful sovereign of Campā. The city itself with its walls, gates, ramparts, palaces, parks and gardens, wealth and prosperity internal joy and happiness, was a veritable paradise on earth. These ideal descriptions are just a part of the general artifice for magnifying the glory of Mahāvīra and his religion. But it is not difficult to make out that the sūtra in its extant form is a much later compilation than the age which witnessed the advent of Mahāvira and the rise of Jainism. The sūtra refers to certain high officials such as gañaņāyaga, dandanāyaga and tālaruru, whose designations are met with in the Indian inscriptions of the post-Christian period (sec. 15). That the Jainas were out to excel the Brahmins, the Buddhists, and the rest in the art of poetical and laboured exaggerations, is particularly noticeable in the enumeration and des. cription of the physical characteristics of Mahāvīra as a great man, the characteristics that are said to be 8,000 in number in place of 32 of the Buddhist tradition (attha-sahassa-varapurişalakkhaṇadhare). There are nevertheless a few earlier references that help us to clarify some parallel Pāli passages. For instance the sūtra expressly mentions the Atharvaveda which is left to be understood in the Buddhist Nikāyas before the expression Itihāsa pañcamam, Itihāsa the fifth Veda. Although some of the later categories of Jain thought such as davva, khetta, kāla and bhava (sec. 28), loe, aloe, jīvā, ajīvā, bandhe, mokkhe and the like (sec. 56) are met with, the method of their treatment is still in an earlier stage of development.
