All the present Jaina monks are considered to be the spiritual descendants of Sudharma, for the other Gaṇadhara left no disciples.
Nuns.Besides the fourteen thousand monks a great multitude of women followed Mahāvīra, and of these some thirty-six thousand, the Jaina say, actually left the world and became nuns. At their head (at least according to the Śvetāmbara) was Ċandana, a first cousin of Mahāvīra’s, or as other accounts have it, his aunt.[1]
In those troublous times acts of oppression and violence must have often occurred, and it was such an act that led to Ċandana’s becoming a nun. Once, as a girl, the story runs, Ċandana was walking in an open garden, when a wicked man named Vidyādhara saw her and, fascinated by her beauty, carried her off, meaning to take her to his own home. On his way thither he began to realize how displeasing her presence in his house would be to his wife, so, without troubling to take her back to the garden where he had found her, he abandoned her in a forest. A hillman found her weeping there, took her to Kauśāmbī and sold her to a wealthy merchant named Vṛiṣabhasena, who installed her in his house against his wife’s will. The wife grew more and more jealous of her, for Ċandana’s beauty increased every day, and ill-treated her in every possible way, clothing her in rags, feeding her on broken meats, and often beating her. Mahāvīra came and preached in Kauśāmbī and poor Ċandana needed but little persuasion to convince her of how evil a place the world was; gladly renouncing it she joined his community and eventually became the head of the nuns.[2]
Laymen.Mahāvīra’s third order consisted of laymen; these