The Kalpa Sutra Attribution

The work most often tied to Bhadrabahu's name is the Kalpa Sutra, the text read and celebrated by Svetambara communities every year during the festival of Paryushana. Its heart is the lives of the Jinas, above all a richly elaborated biography of Mahavira, from the fourteen auspicious dreams of his mother to his liberation, followed by the lineage of elders and the rules for monks during the rainy season retreat. Svetambara tradition names Bhadrabahu as its author, and manuscripts and recitations have carried that ascription for many centuries.

Modern scholarship reads the attribution as traditional rather than documentary. The text as it stands shows layers from different periods, and its final redaction is generally placed at the council of Valabhi in the fifth century CE, roughly eight centuries after Bhadrabahu's traditional dates, when the Svetambara canon was fixed in writing under Devardhigani Kshamashramana. The attribution to the last shruta-kevalin does real work all the same: it anchors the text's authority in the unbroken early transmission, exactly as the lineage lists inside the Kalpa Sutra itself are designed to do. The atlas records the work under its traditional author while noting the scholarly dating, and treats the question of what Bhadrabahu himself composed, if anything now surviving, as genuinely open between the traditions' claims and the manuscript evidence.