History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c13.s2.20

c13.s2.20

These stories clearly contain elements inserted for the edification of the Buddhist community, but the central fact of both versions, the suicide of Pūraṇa, is by no means incredible. Death by ritual suicide was the common end of the Jaina ascetic who felt his faculties begin to fail, and similar suicides by Ājīvikas are well attested.¹ It is probable, as the *Bhagavatī Sūtra* suggests,² that Pūraṇa’s followers developed a legend of their master ending his life by suicide in an odour of sanctity, and that this story was twisted by the Buddhists into the complimentary forms paraphrased above.