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The Scriptures They Do Not Accept

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The Scriptures They Do Not Accept

The Digambaras hold that the scriptures are lost.

Both Jain traditions agree that Mahavira's teaching was transmitted orally for centuries. They disagree entirely about what survived. The Svetambaras hold a canon of forty-five Agamas, codified at a council at Vallabhi in the fifth century. The Digambaras reject that canon as the reconstruction of something already gone: on their account the transmission failed, the original teaching did not survive, and what the other side codified is not it.

What they have instead is a literature dating from their own earliest surviving text, the Satkhandagama, of the second century CE, which preserves fragments held to descend from the lost teaching. The corpus is organised not as a canon but into four categories of subject matter. The Tattvartha Sutra is accepted by both traditions, in slightly different recensions, and is the nearest thing Jainism has to a shared statement of doctrine.

The split itself is dated differently by each side, and the accounts are irreconcilable. The Digambara version has a twelve-year famine in Magadha under Chandragupta Maurya driving Bhadrabahu's monks south, with those who remained in the north adopting robes in their absence. The Svetambara version has the Digambaras breaking away some six centuries after Mahavira, under a monk named Sivabhuti. The decisive scholarly observation is chronological: the earliest surviving Svetambara account dates from the fifth century CE and the earliest Digambara one from the tenth. Both are retrospective by centuries, and the division was almost certainly gradual rather than an event.

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