40 Annual Address. [Feb. 



of a Raja or petty king. His father Siddhartha was the head of a 

 Ksati'iya clan, the so-called Natas or Nayas, who were settled in the 

 suburb Kollaga of the once flourishing town of Vai9ali, whence it 

 is that Mahavira is occasionally designated the Vesaliya or " the man of 

 V"ai9ali." Vai9ali is the modern Besarh, about 27 miles north of Patna. 

 Anciently it consisted of thiee distinct portions,* called Vai9ali, Kunda- 

 gama and Vaniyaofama, and forming, in the main, the quarters in- 

 habited by the Brahman, Ksatriya and Baniya castes respectively. At 

 the present day it has entirely disappeared, but the sites of its three 

 component parts are still marked by the villages of Besarh, Basukund 

 and Baniya. While it existed, it had a curious political constitution ; it 

 was an olis:archic republic ; its government was vested in a Senate, com- 

 posed of the heads of the resident Ksatriya clans, and presided over 

 by an officer who had the title of King and was assisted by a Viceroy 

 and a Commander-in-Chief. Siddhartha was married to Tri9ala, who 

 was a daughter of Cetaka, the then governing King of the republic. 

 From her Mahavira was born in or about 599 B. C, and he was, there- 

 fore, a very highly connected personage. This accounts for the fact 

 that, like his rival Buddha, in the earlier years of his ministry, he 

 addressed himself chiefly to the members of the aristocracy and to his 

 fellow castemen, the Ksatriyas. He married, and his wife Ta96da bore 

 him a daughter Anojja who was mairied to Jamali, a fellow nobleman 

 and, later on, one of his followers. He seems to have lived in the 

 parental house, till his father died, and his elder brother Nandivardhana 

 succeeded to what principality they owned. Then at the age of thirty, 

 he with the consent of the head of his house, entered the spiritual 

 career, which in India, just as in Europe, offered a field for the ambition 

 of younger sons. In Kollaga, the Naya clan kept up a religious estab- 

 lishment, doubtless similar to those still existing in the present day. 

 There is one, near Calcutta, in the Maniktola suburb, which is pro- 

 bably known to most of us. Such establishments consist of a park or 

 garden, enclosing a temple and rows of cells for the accommodation of 

 monks, sometimes also a stupa or sepulchral monument. The whole 

 complex is not unusually called a Caitya, though this is strictly only 

 the name of the shrine within it. The Caitya of the Naya clan was 

 called Duipalasa, and it was kept up for the accommodation of the 

 monks of Par9vanatha's order, to whom the Naya clan professed 

 allegiance. 



Mahavira, on adopting the monk's vocation, would naturally retire 

 to the Duipalasa Caitya and join the Order of Par9vanatha. But the 

 observances of that order do not seem to have satisfied his notions of 

 stringency, one of the cardinal points of which was absolute nudity. 



