History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c12.s6.77

c12.s6.77

Hoernle has made two attempts to fix the date of Gosāla’s death. In the first he suggests 483 B.C., arrived at by counting back sixteen years from Jacobi’s date for Mahāvīra’s *nirvāṇa*.⁴ His second and revised estimate involves more complicated calculations.⁵ He accepts 482 B.C. as the “practically certain” date of the Buddha’s *nirvāṇa*. The father and predecessor of Ajātasattu, King Bimbisāra, was murdered by his son eight years before the *nirvāṇa*, or in 490 B.C. Hoernle believes that for some years before this Ajātaśattu was *de facto* ruler, and that the war took place not in the year of his legal, but of his *de facto* accession, which cannot have been long before the murder of Bimbisāra. Jacobi's theory of the later date of Mahāvīra's death he now rejects, in order to devise a chronological scheme according to which Mahāvīra may predecease the Buddha; but the *Bhagavatī* tradition of the sixteen years' interval between the deaths of Mahāvīra and Gosāla he accepts without question. He therefore suggests 484 B.C. for the death of Mahāvīra and 500 B.C. for that of Gosāla, and for the war and the *de facto* accession of Ajātaśattu.