D. They are all on the
pedestals of statues, which are recognisable partly by the special mention
of the names of Vardhamana and the Arhat Mahavira, partly by absolute
nudity and other marks. They show, that the Jaina community continued to
flourish in Mathura and give besides extraordinarily important
information, as I found in a renewed research into the ancient history of
the sect. In a number of them, the dedicators of the statues give not only
their own names, but also those of the religious teachers to whose
communities they belonged. Further, they give these teachers their
official titles, still used among the Jainas: _vachaka_, 'teacher',
and _ga[n.]in_, 'head of a school'. Lastly they specify the names of
the schools to which the teachers belonged, and those of their
subdivisions. The schools are called, _ga[n.]a_, 'companies'; the
subdivisions, _kula_, 'families' and _['s]akha_, 'branches'.
Exactly the same division into _ga[n.]a, ['s]akha_, and _kula_
is found in a list in one of the canonical works, of the ['S]vetambaras,
the _Kalpasutra_, which gives the number of the patriarchs and of the
schools founded by them, and it is of the highest importance, that, in
spite of mutilation and faulty reproduction of the inscriptions, nine of
the names, which appear in the _Kalpasutra_ are recognisable in them,
of which part agree exactly, part, through the fault of the stone-mason or
wrong reading by the copyist, are somewhat defaced.
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