G^ainism, that was impossible; but the true faith was re¬ vealed in different periods by numberless prophets, and so it will be in the time to come. The theory of former prophets seems, therefore, to be a natural consequence of both religions; besides, it was not wholly unfounded on facts, at least as regards the G^ainas. For the Nirgranthas are never spoken of in the Buddhist writings as a newly risen sect, nor N^taputta as their founder. Accordingly the Nirgranthas were probably an old sect at the time of Buddha, and Nitaputta only the reformer of the G^aina church, which may have been founded by the twenty-third Tirthakara, Pirwa. But what seems astonishing is the fact that the G^ainas and Bauddhas have hit on nearly the INTRODUCTION.
XXXV same number of prophets believed to have risen since the creation of the present order of things, the former worship¬ ping twenty-four Tirthakaras, the latter twenty-five Bud¬ dhas. I do not deny that in developing this theory one sect was influenced by the other; but I firmly believe that it cannot be made out which of the two sects first invented, or borrowed from the Brdhmans, this theory. For if the twenty-five Buddhas were worshipped by the Buddhists of the first centuries after the Nirvawa, the belief in twenty-four Tirthakaras is equally old, as it is common to the Digambaras and ^vetimbaras, who separated pro¬ bably in the second century after the Nirvdwa. However the decision of the question whether the Buddhists or the < 9 ainas originally invented the theory of the succes¬ sion of prophets, matters little; it cannot influence the result to which the previous discussion has led us, viz. (i) that fzainism had an origin independent from Buddhism, that it had a development of its own, and did not largely borrow from the rival sect; (2) that both 6^ainism and Buddhism owed to the Brihmans, especially the Sa;«nya- sins, the groundwork of their philosophy, ethics, and cosmogony.
Our discussion has as yet been conducted on the supposi¬ tion that the tradition of the (Fainas as contained in their sacred books may on the whole be credited. But the intrin¬ sic value of this tradition has been called into question by a scholar of wide views and cautious judgment. Mr. Barth, in the Revue de I’Histoire des Religions, vol. iii, p. 90, admits that an historical personage is hidden under NMaputta, but he doubts that valid inferences may be drawn from the sacred books of the ( 7 ainas which, avowedly, have been reduced to writing in the fifth century A. D., or nearly a thousand years after the foundation of the sect. For, in his opinion,' the self-conscient and continuous existence of the sect since that remote epoch, i. e. the direct tradition of peculiar doctrines and records, has not yet been demon¬ strated. During many centuries,’ he says, ‘ the 6^ainas had not become distinct from the numerous groups of ascetics who could not boast of more than an obscure floating xxxvi GAINA SUTRAS.
existence.^ The tradition of the (Fainas appears to Mr. Barth to have been formed of vague recollections in imitation of the Buddhist tradition.
Mr. Barth seems to base his theory on the assumption that the 6^ainas must have been careless in handing down their sacred lore, since they formed, for many centuries, but a small and unimportant sect. I cannot see the force of this argument of Mr. Barth’s. Is it more likely that a sect of which the not very numerous followers are scattered over a large country, or a church which has to satisfy the reli¬ gious wants of a great multitude, will better preserve its original tenets and traditions? It is impossible to decide this question on 4 priori grounds. The Jews and the Parsis may be adduced as instances in favour of the former view, the Roman Catholic church as one in favour of the latter. But we are not obliged to rely on such generalities in order to decide the question at issue with regard to the f^ainas, for they were so far from having only dim notions of their own doctrines that they pronounced as founders of schisms those who differed from the great bulk of the faithful in comparatively unimportant details of belief. This fact is proved by the tradition about the seven sects of the ^■vetimbaras made known by Dr. Leumann^. The Digam- baras also, who separated from the 5 vetambaras probably in the second or third century after the Nirv 4 «a, differ from their rivals but little with regard to philosophical tenets; yet they were nevertheless stigmatised by the latter as heretics on account of their rules of conduct. All these facts show that the (?ainas, even previous to the redaction of their sacred books, had not a confused and undefined creed, which would have been liable to become altered and defiled by doctrines adopted from widely different religions, but one in which even the minutest details of belief were fixed.
What has been said about the religious doctrines of the frainas can also be proved of their historical traditions. For the detailed lists of teachers handed down in the several GdikkhKS^, and those incorporated in their sacred ' See Indische Studien, XVI.
2 See Dr. Klatt, Ind. Ant. XI.
INTRODUCTION.
XXXVll books, show that the 6^ainas did possess an interest in the his¬ tory of their church. I do not deny that a list of teachers may be invented, or an incomplete one filled up or made pakka, as the Hindus would say; the necessity of proving itself to be legitimately descended from a recognised authority may induce a sect to invent the names of a line of teachers. But what could have caused the G^ainas to fabricate such a detailed list of teachers, Gana,s, and.Sakhas as that in the Kalpa Sutra? Of most of the details the 6^ainas of later times knew nothing beyond what they found in the Kalpa Sutra itself,—and that is unfortunately very little,—nor did they pretend to anything more. For all practical purposes the short list of Sthaviras, as it stands in the Kalpa Sutra, would have been sufficient; the pre¬ servation of the detailed list, containing so many bare names, proves that they must have had an interest for the members of the early church, though the more accurate knowledge of the times and events chronicled in that list was lost after some centuries.
However, it is not enough to have proved that the 6^ainas, even before the redaction of their sacred books, possessed the qualities necessary for continuing their creed and tradi¬ tion, and preserving them from corruptions caused by large borrowings from other religious systems; we must also show that they did do what they were qualified to do. This leads us to a discussion of the age of the extant Gaina literature. For if we succeed in proving that the 6^aina literature or at least some of its oldest works were composed many centuries before they were reduced to writing, we shall have reduced, if not closed, the gap sepa¬ rating the prophet of the 6^ainas from their oldest records.
The redaction of the Gaina canon or the Siddhanta took place, according to the unanimous tradition, on the council of Valabhi, under the presidency of Devarddhi. The date of this event, 980 (or 993) A.V., corresponding to 454 (or 467) A. is incorporated in the Kalpa Sutra (§ 148). Devard¬ dhi Ga;«in, says the tradition, perceiving the Siddhanta in * It is possible, but not probable, that the date of the redaction fell sixty years later, 514 (527) A. D.; see Kalpa Sutra, introduction, p. 15.
xxxviii GAINA SUTRAS.
danger of becoming extinct, caused it to be written in books. Before that time teachers made no use of written books when teaching the Siddhinta to novices, but after that time they did use books. The latter part of this statement is evidently true. For in olden times books were not used, it being the custom of the Brahmans to rely rather on the memory than on the MSS., and in this they were, almost without doubt, followed by the (Jainas and Buddhists. But now-a-days Yatis use MSS. when teaching the sacred lore to their novices. There is no reason why we should not credit the tradition that this change in the method of instruction was brought about by Devarddhi Gz.nm; for the event was of too great import¬ ance not to be remembered. To provide every teacher or at least every Upa^raya with copies of the sacred books, Devarddhi Gawin must have issued a large edition of the Siddhinta. This is probably the meaning of the traditional record that Devarddhi caused the Siddhanta to be written in books, for it is hardly credible that the Gaina monks should never before have attempted to write down what they had to commit to memory; the Brihmans also have MSS. of their sacred books, though they do not use them in handing down the Veda. These MSS. were intended for private use, to aid the memory of the teacher. I make no doubt that the same practice was observed by the Gaina monks, the more so as they were not, like the Brahmans, influenced by any theory of their own not to trust to MSS., but were induced merely by the force of the prevalent custom to hand down their sacred lore by word of mouth. I do not maintain that the sacred books of the Gainas were originally written in books, for the same argument which has been brought forward to prove that the Buddhist monks could have had no MSS., as they are never men¬ tioned in their sacred books, in which ‘ every movable thing, down to the smallest and least important domestic utensils, is in some way or other referred to the same argument, I say, holds good with regard to the Gainas as long as the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xiii, introduction, p. xxxiii.
INTRODUCTION.
XXXIX monks led a wandering life; but when the monks were settled in Upa^rayas exclusively belonging to themselves, they may have kept there their MSS. as they do now- a-days.
Devarddhi’s position relative to the sacred literature of the 6^ainas appears therefore to us in a different light from what it is generally believed to have been. He probably arranged the already existing MSS. in a canon, taking down from the mouth of learned theologians only such works of which MSS. were not available. Of this canon a great many copies were taken, in order to furnish every seminary with books which had become necessary by the newly introduced change in the method of religious instruc¬ tion. Devarddhi’s edition of the Siddhinta is therefore only a redaction of the sacred books which existed before his time in nearly the same form. Any single passage in a sacred text may have been introduced by the editor, but the bulk of the Siddhanta is certainly not of his making. The text of the sacred books, before the last redaction of the Siddhinta, did not exist in such a v^ue form as it would have been liable to if it were preserved only by the memory of the monks, but it was checked by MSS.
On this premise we now proceed to inquire into the date of the composition of the sacred books of the 6^ainas. Their own dogmatical theory that all sacred books were revealed by the first Tirthakara, shall only be noticed to be dis¬ missed. We must try to discover better grounds for fixing the age when the chief works of the Siddhanta were composed.
As single passages may have crept into the text at any time, we can draw no valid inferences from them, even if they be sanctioned by Devarddhi^s receiving them into his revised text. I attach therefore no great weight to the lists of barbarous or un-Aryan tribes^, nor to the mention of all seven schisms, the last of which occurred 584 a. V.^ Nothing is more common than that such details should be ‘ Among the latter Arava may denote the Arabs, as Weber thinks, or, as I prefer to think, the Tamils, whose language is called Aravamu by the Dravidians.
‘ See Weber, Indische Studien, XVI, p. 337.
xl GAINA SUTRAS.
added as a gloss, or be incorporated even in the text, by those who transmitted it either in writing or in instructing their pupils. But an argument of more weight is the fact that in the Siddhanta we find no traces of Greek astro¬ nomy. In fact the Gaina astronomy is a system of incre¬ dible absurdity, which would have been impossible, if its author had had the least knowledge of the Greek science. As the latter appears to have been introduced in India about the third or fourth century A. D., it follows that the sacred books of the Gainas were composed before that time.
Another argument which offers itself for fixing the period of the composition of the sacred books, is the language in which they are written. But, unfortunately, it is not at all clear whether the sacred books have been handed down in that lan¬ guage in which they were composed, or in that in which they were pronounced, and transcribed in later generations, accord¬ ing to the then current idiom, till Devarddhi’s edition put an end to the modernising of the language of the sacred books. I am inclined to believe the latter view to be correct, and look upon the absence of a self-consistent orthography of the Gaina Prakrit as the effect of the gradual change of the vernacular language in which the sacred books were re¬ cited. In all MSS. of Gaina texts, the same word is not always spelt in the same way. The differences of spelling refer chiefly to the retention, omission, or attenuation of single consonants between vowels, and the retention of the vowels e,o, before two consonants, or their change in i, u. It is hardly possible that the different spellings of a word should all correctly represent the pronunciation of that word at any given time, e.g. bhuta, bhhya; udaga, udaya, uaya; lobha, loha‘, &c.; but probably we must regard these methods of spelling as historical spellings, that is to say, that all different spellings presented in the MSS. which formed the materials for Devarddhi^s edition of the Siddhdnta, were looked upon as authentical and were preserved in all later copies of the sacred texts. If this assumption is correct, we ^ I do not contend that no double forms of any word were current at any time, for there must have been a good many double forms, but I doubt that nearly every word should have existed in two or three forms.
INTRODUCTION.
xli must regard the most archaic spellings as representing the pronunciation at or shortly after the epoch of the composi¬ tion of the sacred books, and the most modern one as repre¬ senting the pronunciation at or shortly before the redaction of the Siddhintak Now on comparing the 6^aina Prikrit especially in the oldest form attainable with the P 41 i on one side, and the Prakrit of Hala, Setubandha, See. on the other, it will appear to approach more the P^li than the later Prakrit. We may therefore conclude that chronologically also the sacred books of the <?ainas stand nearer those of the Southern Buddhists than the works of later Prikrit writers.
But we can fix the date of the 6^aina literature between still narrower limits by means of the metres employed in the sacred books. I am of opinion that the first book of the A/^aranga Sutra and that of the Sutrakrftinga Sutra may be reckoned among the most ancient parts of the Siddhanta; the style of both works appears to me to prove the correctness of this assumption. Now a whole lesson of the Sutrakrftinga Sutra is written in the Vaitiliya metre. The same metre is used in the Dhammapadam and other sacred books of the Southern Buddhists. But the Pali verses represent an older stage in the development of the Vaitaliya than those in the Sutrakrftanga, as I shall prove in a paper on the post-Vedic metres soon to be published in the Journal of the German Oriental Society. Compared with the common Vaitaliya verses of Sanskrit literature, a small number of which occur already in the Lalita Vistara, the Vaitaliya of the Sfitrakrftahga must be considered to represent an earlier form of the metre. Again, ancient Pali works seem to contain no verses in the Arya metre; at least there is none in the Dhammapadam, nor have I found one in other works. But both the A^iranga and SfitrakrftMga * It might be objected that archaic spellings are due to the influence of the knowledge of Sanskrit; but the Gainas must always have been so well acquainted with Prakrit that they needed not any help from the Sanskrit to understand their sacred books. On the contrary, in their Sanskrit MSS. we frequently meet with words spelt like Prakrit words. Besides, some spellings cannot be explained as Sanskriticisms, e.g. daraga for dSraya, the Sanskrit prototype being daraka.
xlii GAINA SUTRAS.
contain each a whole lecture in Arya verses of a form which is decidedly older than, and probably the parent of the common Aryi. The latter is found in the younger parts of the Siddhanta, in the Brahmanical literature, both in Prikrit and in Sanskrit, and in the works of the Northern Buddhists, e. g. the Lalita Vistara, &c. The form of the TrishAibh metre in ancient Gaina works is younger than that in the Pali literature and older than that in the Lalita Vistara. Finally the great variety of artificial metres in which the greater number of the Gathas in the Lalita Vistara, &c., is composed and which are wanting in the Gaina Siddhinta, seems to prove that the literary taste of the Gainas was fixed before the composition of the latter works. From all these facts we must conclude that the chronological position of the oldest parts of the Gaina literature is intermediate between the Pili literature and the composition of the Lalita Vistara. Now the Pali Pi^akas were written in books in the time of Va^^a Gama«i, who began to reign 88 B.C. But they were in existence already some centuries before that time. Professor Max Muller sums up his discussion on that point by saying: ‘ We must be satisfied therefore, so far as I can see, at present with fixing the date, and the latest date, of a Buddhist canon at the time of the Second Council, 377 B.c.^’ Additions and alterations may have been made in the sacred texts after that time; but as our argument is not based on a single passage, or even a part of the Dhammapada, but on the metrical laws of a variety of metres in this and other Pali books, the admission of alterations and additions in these books will not materially influence our conclusion, viz. that the whole of the Gaina Siddhanta was composed after the fourth century B. c.
We have seen that the oldest works in the Gaina canon are older than the Gathas in the Lalita Vistara. As this work is said to have been translated into Chinese 65 A.D., we must place the origin of the extant Gaina literature before the beginning of our era. If we may judge about ' Sacred Books of the East, vol. x, p. xxxii.
INTRODUCTION.
xliii the distance in time of the questionable date from either limit by the greater or less resemblance of the oldest 6^aina works in verse with such of the Southern and North¬ ern Buddhists as regards metrical or stylistic peculiarities, we should place the beginning of the 6^aina literature nearer the time of the Pili literature, rather than that of the Northern Buddhists. This result agrees pretty well with a tradition of the Nvetimbaras. For they say' that after the twelve years’ famine, while Bhadrabahu was the head of the church, the Ahgas were brought together by the Sahgha of P 4 ^aliputra. Now Bhadrabihu’s death is placed 170 A. V. by the Nvetimbaras, and 162 A. V. by the Digambaras; he lived therefore, according to the former, under.ATandragupta, who is said to have ascended the throne 155 A.v. Professor Max Muller assigns to ATandra- gupta the dates 315-291 B.C.; Westergaard prefers 320 B.c. as a more likely date for ATandragupta, and so does Kern^ However this difference matters little: the date of the collec¬ tion or, perhaps more correctly, the composition of the 6^aina canon would fall somewhere about the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third century B.C. It is worth noticing, that according to the above-cited tradition, the Sahgha of Pai'aliputra collected the eleven Ahgas without the assist¬ ance of Bhadrabahu. As the latter is claimed by the Digambaras for one of their teachers, and as the Nvetimbaras, though doing the same,still continue the list of Sthaviras from Sambhutavi^ya, Bhadrabahu’s fellow Sthavira, not from Bhadrabahu himself, it seems to follow that the Ahgas, brought together by the Sahgha of Pa^aliputra, formed the canon of the Svetambaras only, not that of the whole G^aina church. In that case we should not go wrong in placing the date of the canon somewhat later, under the patriarchate of Sthulabhadra, i. e. in the first part of the third century B. C.
If the result of our preceding inquiry deserves credit— and I see no counter arguments entitling us to mistrust our conclusion—the origin of the extant G^aina literature cannot be placed earlier than about 300 B.C., or two centuries after ^ Parisish/a Parvan IX, 55 seqq.
^ Geschiedenis van het Buddhisme in Indie, ii, p. 266 note.
xliv GAINA SUTRAS.
the origin of the sect. But we are not from this fact obliged to assume that the 6^ainas in the time intermediate between their last prophet and the composition of their canon had to rely on nothing more solid than a religious and legendary tradition, never brought into a fixed form. In that case, Mr. Barth’s objections to the trustworthiness of the Gaina. tradition would, it is true, not be without ground. However, we are told by the 6'vetambaras, as well as the Digambaras, that besides the Angas, there existed other and probably older works, called Pfirvas, of which there were originally fourteen. The knowledge of these Purvas was gradually lost, till at last it became totally extinct. The tradition of the 6'vetambaras about the four¬ teen Purvas is this; the fourteen Purvas had been in¬ corporated in the twelfth Anga, the Drfshdvada, which was lost before looo A.V. But a detailed table of con¬ tents of it, and consequently of the Purvas, has survived in the fourth Anga, the Samavayanga, and in the Nandi SutraWhether the Purvas, contained in the T>risht\- vada, were the original ones, or, as I am inclined to believe, only abstracts of them, we cannot decide; at all events there has been a more detailed tradition about what they contained.
Now we should as a rule be careful in crediting any tradition about some lost book or books of great antiquity, because such a tradition is frequently invented by an author to furnish his doctrines with an authority from which they may be derived. But in our case, there are no grounds for suspecting the correctness of so general and old a tradition as that about the Purvas. For the Angas do not derive their authority from the Purvas, but are believed to be coeval with the creation of the world. As a fraud, the tradition about the Purvas would therefore be unin¬ telligible; but accepted as truth, it well falls in with our views about the development of the Gaina literature. The name itself testifies to the fact that the Purvas were superseded by a new canon, for purva means former, ' See Weber, Indische Stndien, XVI, p. 341 seqq.
INTRODUCTION, xlv earlier^; and it is assuredly not by accident that the know¬ ledge of the Purvas is said to have commenced to fade away at the same time when the Ahgas were collected by the Sahgha of Piifaliputra. For after Bhadrabahu, only ten out of the fourteen Purvas were known.
This then is the most natural interpretation we can place on the tradition about the fourteen Purvas, that they were the oldest sacred books, which however were superseded by a new canon. But as regards the cause of the abolition of the old canon and the composition of a new one, we are left to conjecture, and only as such I shall give my opinion. We know that the Drfshi^ivida, which included the fourteen Purvas, dealt chiefly with the drfshds or philosophical opinions of the 6^ainas and other sects. It may be thence inferred that the Purvas related controversies held between Mahivira and rival teachers. The title prav 4 da, which is added to the name of each Pflrva, seems to affirm this view. Besides, if MahSvira was not the founder of a new sect, but as I have tried to prove, the reformer of an old one, it is very likely that he should vigorously have combated the opinions of his opponents, and defended those he had accepted or improved. The founder of a religion has to establish his own system, he is not so much in danger to become a mere controversialist as a reformer. Now if the discourses of Mahivira, remembered and handed down by his disciples, were chiefly controversies, they must have lost their interest when the opponents of Mahivira had died and the sects headed by them had become extinct. Could such contentions about philosophical questions which were no more of any practical importance, and bickerings of divines all but forgotten, though these things were of paramount interest to the contemporary world, serve as a canon for later generations who lived in thoroughly changed circum¬ stances? The want of a canon suiting the condition of the * The Gainas explain the meaning of the word pdrva in the following way. The Ttrthakara himself taught the Pdrvas to his disciples, the Gaaadharas. The Garaadharas then composed the Ahgas. There is evidently some truth in this tradition, as it does not agree with the dogma of the Ahgas, being taught already by the first Ttrthakara. See Weber, Indische Studien, XVI, p. 353.
xlvi GAINA stjTRAS.
community must have made itself felt, and it led, in my opinion, to the composition of a new canon and the neglect of the old one.
Professor A. Weber^ assigns as the probable cause of the Drfsh^iv^da being lost, that the development of the Svetambara sect had arrived at a point where the diversity of its tenets from those embodied in that book became too visible to be passed over. Therefore the Drfshrivdda, which contained the Purvas, fell into neglect. I cannot concur in Professor Weber’s opinion, seeing that the Digambaras also have lost the Purvas, and the Ahgas to boot- It is not probable that the development of frainism during the two first centuries after the Nirv 4 «a should have gone on at so rapid a pace that its two principal sects should have been brought to the necessity of discarding their old canon. For, as stated above, after the splitting of the church in these two sects the philosophical system of the frainas remained stationary, since it is nearly the same with both sects. As regards ethics, both sects, it is true, differ more. But as the extant canon of the 6'vet^mbaras is not falling into neglect, though many practices enjoined in it have long since been abandoned, it is not more probable that they should have been more sensible on the same score at the time when the Pfirvas formed their canon. Besides, some of the Purvas are said to have continued to be extant long after the time which we have assigned for the formation of the new canon. At last they disappeared, not by an intentional neglect, I presume, but because the new canon set into clearer light the Gaina. doctrines, and put them forward more systematically than had been done in the controversial literature of the Purvas.