Jainism divided over the question of what survived, and the division shapes its textual attestation more directly than in most traditions.
The Svetambara branch holds that a body of canonical scripture, the Agamas, was preserved, transmitted orally for centuries and then committed to writing at councils, the last and most decisive of them at Valabhi. The Digambara branch holds that the original canon was lost, and its authoritative texts, chief among them the Shatkhandagama, are held to preserve what remained through a different line. The two branches therefore do not share a scripture, and a claim sourced to one does not automatically hold for the other.
Alongside the canonical material sits an enormous body of commentary, narrative, philosophical treatise and universal history, and the Kalpa Sutra, which contains the lives of the Tirthankaras and is recited annually, is among the most widely known.
Jain communities also built and maintained manuscript libraries on a scale that has few parallels in South Asia, and those collections preserved not only Jain works but a great deal of other Indian literature that would otherwise have been lost.
The historical anchor is comparatively firm. Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara, is a historical figure contemporary with the Buddha, and his predecessor Parshvanatha is generally accepted as historical as well, which gives the tradition a dated floor that most in this atlas lack.