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The Gods Named Him "Mahavira", the Great Hero
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Subsequently, the transmission of the teaching was incomplete. According to the most probable tradition, in the third century B.C., at the time of a great famine, Bhadrabāhu departed towards the South with his disciples. They took up residence in the region of Śravana Belgo!a,78 while the other munis stayed in the East. 79 A little later on, in an attempt to retrieve what remained of the teaching that had been learned by heart and transmitted by word of mouth, Arya Sthūlabhadra, a contemporary of Bhadrabāhu, assembled the munis in a Council at Pāšaliputra. Although it proved possible to recover the essential elements of the original teaching and of the rules for ascetics, some important portions could not be incorporated, for there were no munis present who knew them. Thus it was necessary to wait till the Council of Valabhi, in the second half of the Vth century A.D., before a consistent, definitive text could be produced of all that had been preserved after his nirvāṇa of the direct teaching of Mahāvira.
Thus, starting from the IIird century B.C., or perhaps even earlier, the Jaina dharma, thanks to wandering munis, started to spread into different regions and there take root. With regard to the exodus of Bhadrabāhu and his disciples in a southerly direction, there are some indications which seem to support the tradition, for example, numerous caves containing inscriptions in brāhmi in the mountainous region of Kumāra and Kumāri Parvata, near the east coast, in what was once the kingdom of Kalinga (Orisa), which suggest the presence of munis coming from the East, who very probably inhabited these caves before the Christian era.80 Towards the middle of the IInd
the only term used within any given tradition, except in the case of the Terapanthis who call themselves a gana.
78 Cf. P 216 ff.
79 According to Śvetãmbara tradition, Bhadrabahu retired to Nepāla for a period of intense concentration; cf. Parisistaparva IX, 55-76; PPN, pp. 515516; Sadhvi Saṁghamitrā, 1979, pp. 68-77.
80 Deo, 1956, p. 93 puts the date of these inscriptions back to the IIIrd or IInd c. B.C.; cf. the photos of some of these caves and sculptures in Fisher and Jain, 1977, pp. 25-26; figs. 1-8.
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