The Council of Mathura

The Svetambara Jain canon is not a book that was written. It is a body of teaching held to descend from Mahavira through a chain of teachers, transmitted orally, and repeatedly at risk. Jain tradition remembers several occasions on which the community had to gather what remained of it, and one of those occasions is Mathura, under the elder Skandila.

The account is of a community that had lost reciters and lost material, coming together to establish what could still be recovered and in what order. What Skandila's assembly produced is called the Mathuri Vacana, the Mathura recitation, and it is one of the recensions the later canon rests on.

Mathura is a plausible place for it. It was a major Jain centre and the archaeology proves it: the Kankali Tila mound has produced a large body of Jain sculpture and inscribed votive tablets from the early centuries of the common era, which is independent evidence of a substantial, well funded and long established Jain community there of exactly the kind that could convene something like this.

What the tradition does not preserve is a clear account of the assembly's procedure, its participants or its date, and the surviving canon does not carry marks showing which readings came from which recension. So the event is remembered, the place is corroborated, and the details are gone. The atlas records the date as an open question rather than repeating a traditional figure as though it were established.

Jain tradition remembers two recensions of the canon made at about the same time in different places. Skandila made one at Mathura. Nagarjuna made one at Valabhi in Gujarat. The tradition also remembers that the two did not agree, and that the difference was still unresolved when the final Valabhi redaction under Devarddhigani took place generations later.

What the tradition does not record is what was reconciled, on whose authority, or by what method. The final redaction is presented as a settlement without a description of the settling. That leaves a real hole in the textual history of a canon that a living community treats as scripture, and modern scholarship has not been able to fill it from the manuscripts, which do not preserve variant lineages traceable to one recension or the other.

Standing outside all of this is the Digambara community, which holds that the canon in the Svetambara sense was already irrecoverably lost by this period, that what the Svetambaras redacted cannot be what they claim, and that the true teaching survives in a different body of texts altogether. On that view a council to fix the canon is a council to fix something that was no longer there to fix.

This is not a disagreement about a detail. It goes to whether either community possesses the teaching of Mahavira in the form it claims. The atlas states the two positions and does not choose between them, because choosing would mean ruling on a question internal to a living religion.