Studies in the Bhagavati Sutra

Author(s): J C Sikdar
Publisher: Research Institute of Prakrit Jainology & Ahimsa Mujjaffarpur

Page 350

Sec. VI]
STUDIES IN THE BHAGAWATI SUTRA
325
in different capacities, such as, government officials, palace-staff, servants and maids respectively. Their economic conditions can be determined from their respective occupations and social status.
Under the surface of so much opulence of the social wealth there flowed a current of poverty, as it is evidenced by the fact that a section of homeless people wandered from village to village and one of them, namely, Markha Mankhalid had to take shelter in a cowshed of the Brāhmaṇa, Gobahula with his pregnant wife, Bhadrā without obtaining any residence anywhere in the town of Saravana, while the other ones (tanuya-poor)' had to beg the means of subsistence and live on public charity and a section of women was forced by financial circumstances to take up the conditions of slavery and prostitution for sustenance and continuance of their lives.
Moreover, the economic condition of the Cāņdālas (Pānas)" as referred to in this canonical work was not good at all.
An incidental reference to the food prepared in the famine time (dubbikkhabhatta) clearly suggests that the country was sometimes visited by this phenomenon.
Thus here is presented a picture of the outlines of social economy as constructed from the fragmentary evidences furnished by the Bhs. It should be observed that the whole subject of the economic ideas as reflected in this work was based on the ethical principles which do not approve of the most important occupations.
Moreover, the division of labour made on a system of hereditary caste probably arrested the growth of economic progress of the society.
Behind these ethical precepts of the religious teachers and sectarian scruples of the caste, there is found a picture of economic conditions as reflected in the stray references of this canonical work that agriculture was the most natural and
1 BhS, 15, 1, 540. : 16, 1, 9, 77, 8 16, 9, 33, 380 ; 11, 11, 429. 4 16, 3, 1, 134.
5 16, 9, 33, 384.