History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c11.s2.19

c11.s2.19

References in Buddhist or Hindu texts to confirm the historicity of these names are not to be found. Numerous seers and teachers of the Bhāradvāja *gotra* are referred to in the Pāli and later Vedic texts, but there is no reason to believe that the Bhāraddāī of the *Bhagavatī Sūtra* represents any one of them. Ālabhiyā, the city near which he is said to have resided, is not mentioned in Sanskrit literature, but is thought by Hoernle¹ to be identical with the town of Ālavi mentioned in the Pāli scriptures, and identified by Cunningham with the modern Newal, nineteen miles south-east of Kanauj. For the names prior to that of Bhāraddāī no counterparts can be found, but a possible connection with Gosāla’s immediate predecessor, Ajjuṇa Goyamaputta, occurs in the *Lalitavistara*.¹ Here the preceptor of the future Buddha during his youth at Kapilavastu is Arjuna, a great master of mathematics. As a Śākyan this teacher would belong to the Gautama *gotra*,² and his generation, according to the Buddhist tradition, was that immediately preceding the Buddha’s, and therefore also that of Makkhali Gosāla. An interest in number and a tendency to classify numerically is clearly to be found in Gosāla’s teaching as described in the *Sāmañña-phala Sutta* and in the *Bhagavatī Sūtra*. It is not intrinsically impossible that the Śākyan mathematician became in his later life a wandering ascetic, teaching in the neighbourhood of Vesālī, where he came in contact with the young Gosāla, and strongly influenced his views.