Kushan-Era Inscriptions at Mathura Date Jainism's Earliest Named Community

Roughly eighty two years after the Digambara-Svetambara split, already recorded here, and about three hundred seventy years before Devarddhi-gani redacted the Svetambara canon at Valabhi in 453, also recorded here, the Jain community at Mathura produced the earliest evidence historians can attach to specific regnal years rather than to legend. Vincent A. Smith's 1901 catalog of the antiquities recovered from Mathura's Kankali Tila mound, prepared for the Archaeological Survey of India, records donative inscriptions dated to the fifth and seventh years of the Kushan emperor Kanishka, among them a gift of an image of Vardhamana, Mahavira's given name, made by a laywoman identified as the companion of a donor named Sethiniha. Using the conventionally cited dating of Kanishka's accession to around 78 CE, these inscriptions fall in the early 80s CE, though historians continue to debate the Kanishka era's exact starting point by as much as several decades, a debate this entry names rather than resolves. Paul Dundas's academic history of Jainism describes the religion's first several centuries as receiving only sporadic, poorly documented patronage from ruling houses, which is what makes Mathura's dated lay donations, made by named individuals rather than kings, the clearest fixed point historians have onto an organized Jain community this early.