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.