Temples of Kumbhariya

Author(s): M A Dhaky, U S Moorty
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 45

Jainism in Gujarat
Turning to the next events, in Mathurā, a synod (c. V.N.S. 840/A.D. 363), apparently of northern friars, was convened for the redaction of the Nirgrantha canon under the chairmanship of Arya Skandila or Sandila. Contemporaneously, the friars in western India convened a synod at Valabhī in Saurāstra under the leadership of Ārya Nāgārjuna of the Nāgendra sākhā/kula. The differences in the textual readings and the divergencies/discrepancies that happened to be visible between the two versions/recensions—of the Mathurā Synod and the Valabhī Synod—are later reported to have been reconciled by collation during the Valabhi Synod II in V.N.S. 980/993 or A.D. 503/516 under the chairmanship of Devarddhi gani ksamāśramana when the Maitraka chieftain Dhruvasena I was ruling.
In the meantime, in c. late fifth century, Dharasena, a pontiff probably of the Boţika/Kșapanaka rather than of the Digambara sect, who lived in the mountain grotto called Candra-guhā near Girinagara to be precise, is reported to have imparted the knowledge of the Karmapraksti-prābhrta to Puspadanta and Bhūtabali. The available text of the Satkhandāgama, recognized by the Digambara sect as an ‘āgama', apparently is an enlarged, much developed, and neatly organized version of this ancient text that concerned itself with the classification, nature, and operation of ‘karma'. The text-arguably in its primordial form-is believed to be a part of the Pūrva or anterior texts which seemingly had belonged to the sect of Arhat Pārsva.
Ujjayantagiri (Girnār Hills) near Girinagara, from at least the Ksatrapa times onward, had come to be regarded as very sacred because of the creation of a legend involving the 22nd tīrthankara, Jina Aristanemi of the Yādava clan (and supposed in the Nirgrantha tradition to be a cousin of Vāsudeva Śrī Krsna and his stepbrother Balarāma since a member of the collateral branch of the Yādava clan), who is recorded in the āgamas of the late Ksatrapa period as renouncing the worldly ways, attaining omniscience, and finally the salvation, all of these three auspicious events (Kalyāņa-traya) are noted there to have happened on this mountain. Svāmī Samantabhadra (c. A.D. 575-625), the celebrated epistemologist, dialectician, and hymnist of the Digambara sect, apparently had visited this sacred mountain, since in his famous hymn, the Svayambhūstotra, he graphically uses the metaphor ‘kakuda' or bull's hump for its appearance which it does look like in profile. Not too long after the formulation of the Ujjayantagiri legend, the āgama Jñātādharmakathā (present version c. 3rd 4th cent. A.D.) speaks about the five Pandavas attaining release from the bondage of transmigration on Mt. Satruñjaya, one other igneous group of hills, located in south-eastern Saurāstra, which in the centuries to follow gradually rose to