1898.] Annual Address. 41 



So after a trial of one year, he separated, and discarding his clothes, wan- 

 dered about the country of North and South Bihar, even as far as modem 

 Rajmahal. Considering his tenet of absolute nudity, it is no wonder 

 that it took twelve years before he succeeded in gaining a following tliat 

 acknowledged his divine mission. It was now that lie obtained the title 

 of Mahavira or ' Great Hero,' and was acknowledged to be a Jina and 

 Kevalin, i.e., a holy and omniscient person. It is his title of Jina or 

 ' Spiritual Conqueror,' from which the names Jainism and Jain, by which 

 his system and his sect are now generally known, are derived ; and it is 

 Mahavira's initial connection with Par9vanatha's order which accounts for 

 the fact that the latter saint is reckoned in the Jain hierarchy as the 

 immediate predecessor of Mahavira, and that his image is set up in so many 

 Jain temples. The famous sacred hill of Parcvanatha (or Paresnath, as 

 it is commonly called) with its Jain temples also takes its name from him. 

 The last thirty years of his life Mahavira passed in teaching his religious 

 system and organisirig his order of ascetics, which was patronised chiefly 

 by those princes with whom he was related through his mother, the 

 kings of Videha, Magadha and Aijga, i.e., those of North and South 

 Bihar. In the towns and villages which lay in these parts he spent 

 almost the whole period of his ministry, though he extended his travels 

 as far north as fravasti, near the Nepalese frontier, and perhaps as far 

 south as the Paresnath hill. The area of his ministry, therefore, prac- 

 tically coincides with that of his great contemporary Buddha. His life 

 on the whole, was an uneventful one. With Buddha, who, as we now 

 see, was his most formidable rival, he does not appear to have come into 

 any prominent conflict. The Jain sacred books hardly notice him. On 

 the other hand, they tell us of a fierce hostility between Mahavira and 

 another great spiritual chief of those days. This was Gosala, the son 

 of a Mankhali or beggar, who had set up as the head of a section 

 of the Ajivika order of monks, an order which at that time and 

 for some subsequent centuries was so important as to be men- 

 tioned in one of A9oka's pillar edicts about 234 B.C., but which has 

 long since ceased to exist. This Gosala appears to have been the 

 first ^vho attached himself to Mahavira when the latter commenced 

 his naked peregrinations. But after following Mahavira for six years, 

 he quarelled with his master, and set up as a chief of ascetics himself, 

 and that, two years earlier than Mahavira himself ventured to do. This 

 conduct naturally enough explains the intense hostility of Mahavira, 

 who resented the presumption of his former disciple in taking pre- 

 cedence of his master.2 Besides Gosala, the apostate, Mahavira had 



3 I should mention that Prof. Jacobi holds a slightly different view of Grosala's 

 position. According to hitn Gosala and Mahavira were two independent sect 



