History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c24.s4.5

c24.s4.5

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.