Purvas

Jain tradition holds that Mahavira's teaching was first organized into fourteen vast texts called the Purvas, older and, by tradition's own account, more comprehensive than the twelve or eleven Angas that make up the core of the surviving Jain scriptural canon; the twelfth Anga, the Drishtivada, is said to have contained the Purvas as one of its sections, making them formally part of the canon's structure even as their independent content was already regarded as separately ancient and separately vulnerable to loss. Each Purva reportedly treated an enormous scope of subject matter, cosmology, logic, mathematics, astrology, and metaphysics organized to a scale later commentators describe in terms of an almost unimaginable number of verses, figures that read as traditional expressions of the Purvas' totality and antiquity rather than as literal manuscript measurements.

Transmission of material this vast depended entirely on memorization by successive generations of monks capable of holding the whole body of teaching in mind, a chain that tradition records as weakening steadily after Mahavira's death, with successive teachers said to have known fewer and fewer of the fourteen texts completely until, within several centuries, no one any longer held the entire set in memory at all.

Jainism's two major traditions, Svetambara and Digambara, disagree sharply about the fate and authenticity of most of the rest of the scriptural canon, since the Digambara tradition holds that the entire original canon, not only the Purvas, was lost centuries after Mahavira and rejects the Svetambara canon as a later, only partially faithful reconstruction.

On the Purvas specifically, however, the two traditions substantially agree: both hold that the fourteen Purvas as complete, independent texts no longer exist in any form, surviving only through fragmentary summaries, quotations and topic lists preserved inside later canonical works, chiefly sections of the Svetambara Drishtivada tradition and later commentarial literature that describes what the Purvas supposedly contained without transmitting their actual verses. This makes the Purvas an unusually clean case of acknowledged scriptural loss within a living tradition, openly recorded as gone by the tradition's own historians rather than a loss modern scholarship discovered from outside, and it is recorded here as attested-but-lost rather than as debated, since the debate in Jain scholarship concerns how much of the Purvas' content survives indirectly in later texts, not whether the original works themselves still exist.