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The Followers of the Ever Growing One
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discover, while copying out the texts of the Āgamas, that no mention 1 was anywhere to be found in them of the worship of images. This idot-worship, with all that it involved of expense and show, had assumed immense importance in the West, at the same time entraining with it a certain fading of the original ideal of interiority and purification. To all this Lonkā Sāha re-acted, preaching a return to simplicity and the spiritual, and at the beginning of the XVlth century he founded the Lonkā-sampradāya, whose members categorically rejected temple-worship. The birth of this sampradāya has also been attributed to the direct influence of Islām which, being profoundly iconoclastic in temperament, succeeded in working upon certain spirits among the Jainas. 185 It does not secm, however, that the sampradāya spread outside Gujarāta.
Another reform took place at the beginning of the XVIIIih century, when Viraji, a śrāvaka of the Lonkā-sampradāya living at Sürata, denounced what he felt to be a slackening of ascetic life among the munis. Thus, after receiving dikṣā, he in his turn became the founder of a new spiritual family. This reform aimed at recovering the initial strictness taught by Mahāvira and stipulated by the Agamas. The members of this sampradāya took the name Sthầnakavāsis on account of their condemnation of temple-worship; they held their gatherings for spiritual exercises in a sthāna, some ordinary building, an upāśraya or any other dwelling. A large number of those belonging to the Lonkā-sampradāya joined the Sthānakayāsis, who proceeded to establish a firm footing in Gujarăta and Rājasthāna. In addition to the question of worship, they deviate from the other Svetāmbaras on the subject of the Sctiptures: they do not accept the authority of certain Agamas, and do not recognise the Mahāniśitha, the Jitakalpa of the Cheda-sūtras, nor the ten (or eleven, according to another classification) Prakirņakas; they place, too, the Nandi-sūtra and the ! Anuyogadvāra in the Müla-sūtras. (cf. Deo, ibid., pp. 440-441.)
The coming into being of the Sthānakavāsis inaugurated a farreaching change among the Svetāmbara sådhvis as regards their expression of veneration of the arhats. Until the beginning of the XVIIIth century, texts and inscriptions mention either Digambara
185 Cf. Deo, 1956, p. 440; K.C. Jain, 1963, pp. 90-91.
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