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History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c24.s4: The Gods

History and Doctrines of the Ājīvikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c24.s4

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The Gods

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The *Bhagavatī Sūtra* names two divinities who were worshipped by the simpler folk of North-Eastern India at the time of the great teachers, and who filled a comparatively humble place in the pantheons of the greater communities, but who seem to have been given a special status by the Ājīvikas. These are Punnabhadda and Māṇibhadda, or, in their Sanskrit forms, Pūrṇabhadra and Maṇibhadra. We meet them first as the divinities whose duty it is to test the dying ascetic on the last night of his final penance; if he yields to their caresses he is born again, if he resists he is saved.² The same two appear again as the generals of the fierce Ājīvika king, Mahāpaüma, the reincarnation of Gosāla Maṅkhaliputta.³ The Tamil text *Nīlakēci* mentions two *devas*, Okkali and Ōkali, who, according to the mythology of the Dravidian Ājīvikas, are said to have instructed men in the scriptures, presumably having received them from the divine Markali.⁴

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² V. supra, p. 128.

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³ V. supra, p. 142.

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⁴ *Nil.* v, 681. V. supra, p. 215.

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Pūrṇabhadra and Maṇibhadra are well known yakṣas, popular divinities of the period in the Ganges valley. The Mahāniddesa refers to worshippers of Vāsudeva, Baladeva, Puṇṇabhadda, and Maṇibhadra.¹ Thus they appear to have been coupled in popular devotion with the rising Vaiṣṇavite heroes. In Jainism they are chiefs of the demigods, Pūrṇabhadra of the Southern horde of yakṣas and Maṇibhadra of the Northern.² The Mahābhārata refers to Maṇibhadra as a king of the yakṣas, and he seems to have been a tutelary deity of travellers.³ In the epic his companion Pūrṇabhadra does not appear as a yakṣa, but as a nāga, one of the hundred sons of Kadru.⁴ Despite this discrepancy, it is clear that the two demigods were popular objects of worship among the inhabitants of a wide area of Northern India. A relic of the cult is a large statue of Maṇibhadra, set up by a guild of his worshippers at Pāwayā, Gwalior, in the first century B.C., which is among the earliest examples of Indian sculpture in the round.⁵ Okkali and Ōkali, the Tamil counterparts of the two devas of the Northern Ājīvikas, were probably popular local Dravidian demigods of a similar type, other record of whom has now vanished, who took the place of Pūrṇabhadra and Maṇibhadra when Ājīvikism spread to the south.

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¹ Mahāniddesa, i, pp. 89, 92.

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² Sthānāṅga, 9, teste Abh. Rāj. s.vv. Punnabhadda, Māṇibhadda.

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³ Vana, 61, 123 (Poona edn.), and refs. in Sörensen, Index of Names in the Mbh., s.v. Maṇibhadra.

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⁴ Ādi, 35, 12 (Kumbhakonam edn.). The Poona edn. (Ādi, 31, 12) gives the name as Pūrṇadamṣṭra.

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⁵ Coomaraswamy, Yakṣas, pt. i, p. 38, and pl. I.

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As well as of these two there is every reason to believe that Ājīvikism, like Buddhism and Jainism, accepted the reality of the chief Hindu deities. Gosāla, in defining the Ājīvika heavens, in each of which the soul resides during its last transmigrations, mentions Brahmaloka among the Mānasas and Māṇusuttaras.⁶ This indicates that he recognized the existence of the god Brahma, and we may infer that the rest of the Hindu pantheon of the time was accepted by Ājīvikism.

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⁶ V. supra, p. 250.

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Dr. Barua would go further than this. "The same chapter" (of the Bhagavatī Sūtra), he writes, "also points to an age when many Vedic and non-Aryan deities were affiliated to the Ājīviya pantheon, e.g. Punnabhadda, and Māṇibhadda, Sohamma, Sanakkumāra, Bambha, Mahāsukka, Aṇaya, and Āraṇa.” 1 We can only agree with him as regards the first two names, and that of Bambha or Brahma. Admittedly these names and some others do occur in the relevant chapter of the *Bhagavatī Sūtra*, but they are there spoken not by Gosāla, but by Mahāvīra,² who, after Gosāla’s death, prophesies that the soul of his renegade disciple will, after a long period of births in purgatories, attain divinity in the Jaina heavens; the names mentioned by Barua are merely those of some of the twelve Jaina Kalpas,³ and give no indication whatever of the divinities worshipped by the Ājīvikas. We have already seen that the Ājīvika classification of the heavens was very different. Therefore our attempts at reconstructing an Ājīvika pantheon must stop with Pūrṇabhadra, Maṇibhadra, and Brahma. Other gods there must have been, but we have no evidence of their names.

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² Bh. Sū. xv, sū. 560, fol. 693.

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³ V. supra, p. 250, n. 3.

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