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106 Śramaņa, Vol 62, No. 1 January-March 2011
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life, but rather serves to state major facets of Mahāvīra's religious code of conduct. The second Suyakkhandha of the same text, moreover, contains in its third part a partial biography of Mahāvīra,5 which in turn formed the basis for later Mahāvīrabiographies. Inscriptions and reliefs from the 1st century CE accord with the canonical descriptions of Mahāvīra's life found in this text, and these epigraphic and art-historical sources thus attest to the antiquity of the written accounts (WINTERNITZ, 1920:264). Other Śvetambara canonical works contain other protobiographies, in particular the fifth anga, viz. the Bhagavati (Viyahapanṇatti, which contains brief stories of earlier tirthankaras (ibid:300-301)
In the scriptures of the Digambara sect, which must be considered a relatively later textual layer than the Svetambara canon, the Prathamānuyoga section contains the life-stories of Mahāvīra as well as of other Tirthankaras. There stories are said to have been derived from the fourth part of the lost 12th anga called Dṛṣṭivāda (BHUTORIA, 2005:46)
2. Early Biographies in the Canonical and Post-Canonical Literature
In terms of actual biographical literature, WINTERNITZ (1920:327) presents a distinction between two forms of biography: caritra and prabandha.6 The Sanskrit word caritra (also written carita; Prakrit cariya) literally means "going" and has the derived figurative meaning of "deeds, gestes, behavior, exploits, biography, life-story." The word also points to its derivative form caritra (CORT, 1995:476), meaning "right conduct," "observance of vows," thereby indicating the implicit purpose of the caritra genre, namely to exemplify the ideal religious life as exhibited by a saint. The word prabandha literally means "connection, band" and carries the derivative meaning "continuance, succession, story, fiction, collection." According to the medieval Jaina author Rajasekhara (CORT, 1995:498, fn. 26), the word caritra occurs in titles of works presenting life-stories of Tirthankaras, mythical
