1898.] Annual Address. 49 



before the Christian era; for the Council of Patalipufcra which made the 

 collection must have taken place about 300 B.C. The very process of 

 a collection points to the fact of a previous existence ; and the tradition 

 of the Jains maintains that the Purvas, one of the two main divisions of 

 the collection, were taught by Mahavira himself to his immediate 

 disciples, the so-called Ganadharas, and the latter composed the Aqs^as, 

 the other main division. The name Purva means an ' earlier ' composi- 

 tion ; and the Purvas were evidently called so because they existed 

 prior to the Ai)gas. At the time of the Council of Pataliputra a large 

 poi-tion of them, as the Jains themselves admit, had been already lost ; 

 and what still remained was then embodied in a twelfth Aijga. The 

 Jain traditions about these Purvas clearly point to the fact that there 

 was once an original set of sacred books, the remains of which were, 

 by the Pataliputra Council, re-cast and collected in a new form, better 

 adapted to the changed circumstances of the time. 



Such is the tradition of the Jaina order with respect to its history 

 and its sacred books. Until some thirty years ago, the prevalent 

 disposition was to treat this tradition with great distrust. The pre- 

 sence of the strongly developed and curiously exact chronicling spirit, 

 however, which I have already remarked on, as manifest throughout 

 most of the literature of the Jains, lends but little support to that 

 attitude ; and his fact has been increasingly realised through the more 

 intimate acquaintance with Jain literature which has been gained, 

 during the period under review, through the publication of Jain 

 books made by Professors Jacobi, Lenmann, myself and others. 

 Professor Jacobi, by a careful examination of the language and style of 

 the Jain sacred books, which showed their very archaic character, 

 contributed not a little to this result. Still so long as no independent 

 and incontrovertible evidence could be brought forward in corroboration 

 of the statements of the Jain tradition, no full conviction of the general 

 reliability of it could be hoped for. The discovery of such independent 

 corroborative evidence is the most striking feature of the period I am 

 reviewing and is etitirely due to the acumen of Hofrath Prof. Biihler 

 of Vienna.^ On making a re- examination of certain inscriptions, found 

 in 1871 by the late Major-General Sir A, Cunningham in the ruins of the 

 Kaqkhali mound in Mathura,^ Hofrath Biihler discovered among them 

 some whicb made mention of several teachers and subdivisions of the 

 Jains. Accordingly he arranged with Dr. J. Burgess, who was at that 



^ His researches on this subject are contained in a series of papers published 

 in the volumes of the Vienna Oriental Journal for 1887 to 1891 and 1896, and ia 

 the Transactions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna for 1897. 



6 See his Survey Reports, Vol. II. 



