The Doctrine of the Jainas, Described after the Old Sources c6.86

c6.86

§19. Acc. to the Pali texts Mahāvīra was a contemporary of Gautama Buddha, but although for decades they both wandered about one and the same area by no means very extensive preaching and teaching, there is no word being said as to their having met. Buddha is said to have survived Mahāvīra. This information, however, is due to the Buddhists confusing the city of Pāvā, where Mahāvīra died, with the Pāvā, where Buddha stayed shortly before his end, thus concluding that he survived Mahāvīra¹. The latter's Pāvā is referred to as majjhima. This may indicate that for once (perhaps owing to illness) he dwelt in the city proper, and he may well have done so since his quarters were in the residence of a high official in Prince Hatthipāla's service. At any rate he died there in his 72nd year, forty-two years after he had become a monk. Acc. to modern belief Pāvā is the village of Pāvapurī in the district of Patna². Thus Mahāvīra's life passed within a narrow frame of space. All his days he, the aristocrat, had enjoyed the sympathy and the support of the nobles of the country. We have already mentioned his princely relations³, and in Viy. 792b we read that the notables and the noble families of his time adhered to him and his teaching which they helped to spread. Now the collegial princes (gaṇarāyaṇo) of the Mallaki and Licchavi families gave a lamp-ceremony in commemoration of him. Mahāvīra's death or, rather, in terms of spiritual language, his entry into Nirvāṇa represents to the Jains the point from where their chronology starts. The Śvetāmbaras (§ 26) place it 470 years before the beginning of the Vikrama era (57-56 B.C.), the Digambaras (§ 26) 605 years before the Śaka era (78 A.D.), the latter being also erroneously taken for the Vikrama era⁴. By critically dealing with these statements which both lead back to 527-526 B. C., JACOBI⁵ (1879) calculated the year of 467 B.C., and CHARPENTIER⁶ tried to support this date by a new line of argument. In 1891