ces in the traditions concerning
the lives of Vardhamana and Gautama or Buddha. Both were of royal
birth; the same names recur among their relatives and disciples;
and they lived and preached in the same part of the country, Bihar
and Tirhut. [267] Vardhamana is said to have died during Buddha's
lifetime, the date of the latter's death being about 480 B.C. [268]
Their doctrines also, with some important differences, present,
on the whole, a close resemblance. Like the Buddhists, the Jains
claim to have been patronised by the Maurya princes. While Asoka
was mainly instrumental in the propagation of Buddhism over India,
his grandfather Chandragupta is stated to have been a Jain, and his
grandson Sampadi also figures in Jain tradition. A district which is
a holy land for one is almost always a holy land for the other, and
their sacred places adjoin each other in Bihar, in the peninsula of
Gujarat, on Mount Abu in Rajputana and elsewhere. [269] The earliest
of the Jain books belongs to the sixth century A.D., the existence of
the Nirgrantha sect in Buddha's lifetime being proved by the Cingalese
books of the Buddhists, and by references to it in the inscriptions
of Asoka and others. [270] While then M. Barth's theory that Jainism
was simply a later sect of Buddhism has been discarded by subsequent
scholars, it seems likely that several of the details of Vardhamana's
life now recorded in the Jain books are not really authentic, but
were taken from that of Buddha with necessary alterations, when the
true facts about their own prophet had been irrevocably lost.

3. The Jain tenets. The Tirthakars.

Like the Buddhists, the Jains recognise no creator of the world,
and suppose it to have existed from eternity. Similarly, they had
originally no real god, but the Jina or victor, like the Buddha or
Enlightened One, was held to have been an ordinary mortal man, who
by his own power had attained to omniscience and freedom, and out of
pity for suffering mankind preached and declared the way of salvation
which he had found. [271] This doctrine, however, was too abstruse
for the people, and in both cases the prophet himself gradually
came to be deified. Further, in order perhaps to furnish objects of
worship less distinctively human and to whom a larger share of the
attributes of deity could be imputed, in both religions a succession
of mythical predecessors of the prophet was gradually brought into
existence. The Buddhists recog