A History of Indian Literature v2.c20.s3.41

v2.c20.s3.41

The accounts of the schisms, in Haribhadra's commentary on the Āvassaya and Śānti Sūri's commentary on the Uttarajjhayaṇa,³ are of great interest from the point of view of the history and development of the Indian sects. For instance, when we meet, in one of these accounts, with a wandering monk who has bound a copper wire around his garment, and runs about with the branch of a Jambu-tree, offering as a reason for his behaviour, that his garment might burst owing to the fulness of his erudition, and that he has no equal in the whole of the Jambu-continent (*i.e.*, in the whole of India), we are reminded of similar pictures from the lives of Indian sophists in the Upaniṣads and the Buddhist texts.