The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c18.21

v1.c18.21

The Jains themselves have preserved chronological records concerning Mahāvīra and the succeeding pontiffs of the Jain church, which may have been begun at a comparatively early date. But it seems quite clear that, at the time when these lists were put into their present form, the real date of Mahāvīra had already either been forgotten or was at least doubtful. The traditional date of Mahāvīra’s death on which the Jains base their chronological calculations corresponds to the year 470 before the foundation of the Vikrama era in 58 B.C., i.e. 528 B.C.¹ This reckoning is based mainly on a list of kings and dynasties, who are supposed to have reigned between 528 and 58 B.C.; but the list is absolutely valueless, as it confuses rulers of Ujjain, Magadha, and other kingdoms; and some of these may perhaps have been contemporary, and not successive as they are represented. Moreover, if we adopt the year 528 B.C., it would exclude every possibility of Mahāvīra having preached his doctrine at the same time as Buddha, as the Buddhist texts assert; for there is now a general agreement among scholars that Buddha died within a few years of 480 B.C.¹; and therefore some fifty years would have elapsed between the decease of the two prophets. But we are told that Buddha was 80 years old at his death, and that he did not begin preaching before his 36th year, that is to say, at a time when Mahāvīra, according to the traditional date, was already dead. Finally, both Mahāvīra and Buddha were contemporaries with a king of Magadha, whom the Jains call Kūṇika, and the Buddhists Ajātaçatru; and he began his reign only eight years before Buddha’s death. Therefore, if Mahāvīra died in 528 B.C., he could not have lived in the reign of Kūṇika. So we must, no doubt, wholly reject this date and instead of it adopt another which was long ago suggested by Professor Jacobi² on the authority of the great Jain author Hemachandra (d. 1172 A.D.), viz. 468 (467) B.C. The dynastic list of the Jains mentioned above tells us that Chandragupta, the Sandrokottos of the Greeks, began his reign 255 years before the Vikrama era, or in 313 B.C., a date that cannot be far wrong³. And Hemachandra states that at this time 155 years had elapsed since the death of Mahāvīra, which would thus have occurred in 468 B.C. This date agrees very well with other calculations and is only contradicted by a passage in the Buddhist Dīgha Nikāya⁴ which tells us that Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta—the name by which the Buddhists denote Mahāvīra—died before Buddha. This assertion is, however, in contradiction with other contemporaneous statements, and forms no real obstacle to the assumption of the date 468 B.C. We may therefore adopt this year as our basis for calculating the various dates in Mahāvīra’s life.