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S 4. HIS TORICAL POSITION OF THE T. S.
insignificant. However the case of the Jainas' counterattack against the Vaisnavas took a persisten and vigorous course, probably because it involved with the survival of the heavy Jaina communities at Mathura.
The history of the late Kushan dynasty is still in darkness, but it is said that it was fastly changing into Hindunization in contrast to the florescence of Buddhism in the cosmopolitan atmosphere at the beginning period of this dynasty. We do not know when Krsna worship began to gain power. However avatara worship is already attested in the epigraphical sources from the 2nd century onwards, and the mechanism of the theory of avatara can easily absorb the deities of the other religions. The Vaisnavas must have therefore started to absorb the deities of the other religions including the first Tirthankara of the Jainas. The Jainas who were lealing the power at Mathura must have faced this new religious movement with the sense of disgust, but since its growing popularity centred round Mathura became innegligible, they likely retorted them in turn by subordinating Kripa to Neminatha. However this religious fight did not stop there, grew into the socio-economic struggle of the Jaina communities at Mathura, which became decisive by the turnover of the dynasty. For with the advent of the Guptas, the city must have become the centre of the Hindu revival movement, particularly of the Vaisnavas, which went on accelerating into the intensive and large scaled force patronized by the then rulers. The Jainas must have resisted at best to maintain their position at Mathura, however they could not stand out for too long.
The arrival of the age of eclipse for the Jainas must have been sensed by the alert businessmen already at the early stage of social change, and gradually they started to desert Mathura to the places where such social pressures would be less and where their business activities would be more promising. It is thus plausible that the structure of the huge Jaina business communities which constitued a hierarchy or some hierarchies of corporate bodies came to be shaken up and confronted a menacing socio-economic set-back. This must have further accelerated their migration until the majority of the Jaina communities vacated the city. The exodus. of the lay Jaina communities from Mathura naturally caused the migration of the ascetic sanghas as well, because the latter had to depend on the former for their material needs. The change of the power structure at Mathura seems to have thus taken place during the Gupta period. The Jaina puranas in the post-canonical period kept on developing Krig1 theme in the Jaina context, which was perhaps the conti nuation of the persistent counterattack against the Vaisnava movement which drove the Jainas away from Mathura as symbolized in the pandavas' migration to the Southern Mathura.
It appears therefore that the lay Jainas began to desert Mathura at the beginning of the Gupta age and migrated to the West and the South. The Western area
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