Sramana Tradation

Author(s): G C Pandey
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 47

Sramana Tradition
it was a sect which continued to survive for centuries. There is also no doubt that this sect already existed as an old sect in the days of Buddha and Mahavira. Apart from Makkhali Gosala, we hear of two other Ajivika teachers viz., Nanda Vaccha and Kisa Sañkicca, from Buddhist sources. The names of Udai Kundiyāyaṇa and the six other teachers whose bodies were successively reanimated are apparently the names of Makkhali Gosala's predecessors, 16 who were all claimed by him to be a series of bodies animated by the same soul successively. The interpretation of this principle of Pauttaparihāra is somewhat uncertain1 but it seems to be an alternative to the normal course of death and rebirth. It reminds one of the Nirmaṇakaya of the Yogasūtras, which could be used by the Yogi to work out his Karman, or better still of Sankaracarya's Para kaya-pravesa. It is also true that some founding prophets of religions have been regarded as having had a miraculous birth which serves to distinguish them from the common run of sinful mortals, The masters of the Ajivika sect also appear to have claimed that they had a supernatural continuation without generation.
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The doctrine of the Ajivikas is not to be identified with fatalism as such but rather with a special variety of it which included many other little understood dogmas. For this reason Professor Basham's assumption that Pūraṇa Kassapa and Pakudha Kaccayana played a not inconsiderable part in the development of early Ajivikas appears unnecessary. 18 The references in Manimekalai or the Tarka-rahasyadīpikā of Gunaratna are too late to have any independent value. In all probability they reflect the occasional confusion in the ascription of doctrines to particular Parivrajakas, which can be discerned in the early Buddhist and Jaina texts. With fatalism the Ajivikas combined an extreme form of asceticism which included nudity, and austerities culminating in a voluntary suicide through' not drinking '.19 As already
16. Cf. A. L. Basham, History and Doctrine of the Ajīvikus, (London, 1951), p. 31.
17. B. M. Barua, calls it Parinama ada, see his Pre-Buddhistic Indian Philosophy, pp. 315-318.
18. Basham, op. cit., pp. 23ff,
19. Ibid., pp. 127-129,