RELIGIOUS SECTS OF THE HINDUS. 281 



be yet ascertained. Sankara Acharya, the commentator on the texts of 

 Vyasa, affords a more definite approximation ; but he will not carry us 

 back above ten centuries. It is also to be observed, that the objects of 

 the attacks of the Sutras and of Sankara are philosophical and specula- 

 tive tenets, and these may have been current long before they formed part 

 of a distinct practical system of faith, as promulgated by a class of 

 Bauddhas, the germ of the Jains. 



However, we may admit from these authorities the existence of the 

 Jains as a distinct sect, above ten or twelve centuries ago ; we have reason 

 to question their being of any note or importance much earlier. The 

 Bauddhas, we know from Clemens of Alexandria, existed in India in the 

 second century of the Christian sera, and we find them not only the principal 

 objects of Hindu confutation and anathema, but they are mentioned in 

 works of lighter literature, referable to that period, in which the Jains are 

 not noticed, nor alluded to : the omission is the more worthy of notice, 

 because, since the Bauddhas disappeared from India, and the Jains only 

 have been known, it will be found that the Hindu writers, whenever they 

 speak of Bauddhas, shew, by the phraseology and practices ascribed to 

 them, that they really mean Jains: the older writers do not make the same 

 mistake, and the usages and expressions which they give to Bauddha 

 personages are not Jain, but Bauddha ; with the one they were familiar, 

 the other were yet unknown. 



The literature of the Jains themselves is unfavourable to the notion 

 of high antiquity. Hemachandra, one of their greatest writers, flourished 

 in the end of the twelfth century, and the compiler of the Jain Purdnas of 

 the Dekhin, is said to have written at the end of the ninth. The Kalpa 

 Sutra professes to have been composed nine hundred and eighty years 

 after the death of Mahavira, or fifteen centuries ago ; but from internal 



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