influence;[1] he is called the ‘Omniscient of the Kaliyuga’, and with his name we may fitly close our account of the early Heads of the Community.
In our study of the Jaina tradition with regard to Mahāvīra and his successors we have incidentally touched the outstanding points of Jaina history as accepted to-day by European scholars. Not long ago all statements made by the Jaina about themselves were received with the gravest suspicion, but the inscriptions which have been deciphered at Mathurā and elsewhere so corroborate the Jaina account that it would seem well worth while to collect and collate their annals and legends as material for that Jaina history which, owing to the incompleteness of our knowledge, cannot yet be written in full.
The events on which in the meantime most scholars are agreed, and which are borne out in the Jaina history that we have studied, include the existence of the Pārśvanātha order of monks prior to Mahāvīra; the birth of Mahāvīra somewhere about 599 B.C. and his death about 527 B.C.; and the remarkable spread of Jainism under Suhastin in the third century B.C., which, as Dr. Hoernle[2] points out, is corroborated not only by their own paṭṭāvalīs,[3] but also by an inscription of Khāravela on the Khaṇḍagiri rock near Cuttack, which shows that by the middle of the second century the Jaina had spread as far as Southern Orissa.
There is a still earlier inscription dating from about 242 B.C. referring to the Jaina, the edict of Aśoka, the great Maurya king who lived in the third century B.C., which is cited by Vincent Smith.[4] He says in the second part of the seventh ‘pillar’ edict which he issued in the twenty-ninth year of his reign:
