Devarddhi-gani Redacts the Svetambara Canon at Valabhi

By the fifth century CE, the Svetambara branch of Jainism had preserved its scriptures, the Agamas, only through memorized oral recitation across roughly nine centuries since Mahavira, and famine, war and the natural decay of memory had already left the tradition with gaps and disputed readings. At a council convened in Valabhi, in what is now Gujarat, India, the monk Devarddhi-gani Kshamashramana gathered the surviving Svetambara acharyas, most sources place the year at 453 CE, some at 466 CE, and had them recite everything they still held. Rather than discard what could not be corroborated, Devarddhi-gani had every surviving passage written down as it was remembered, gaps, inconsistencies and all, producing the first fixed, written redaction of the Svetambara canon. The written Agamas that resulted became the textual foundation the Svetambara tradition has transmitted ever since, closing thirteen centuries after Parshvanatha's community and continuing directly from the split between the Digambara and Svetambara branches already recorded here, and preceding by more than seven centuries Jagatchandra Suri's founding of the Tapa Gaccha, the Svetambara order that would eventually became the tradition's largest surviving lineage, also already recorded here.