of their members through famine warned their leaders on how precarious a footing the memoriter knowledge of their sacred books stood. However this may be, Sthūlabhadra summoned a council of monks early in the third century b.c. at Pāṭaliputra, the modern Patna, a place historic in the annals of their order and at that time the capital of the Maurya Empire. This council fixed the canon of the Jaina sacred literature, consisting of the eleven Aṅga and the fourteen Pūrva. It seems likely that the books were not committed to writing at this time, but were still preserved in the memories of the monks. The action of the council would thus be limited to settling what treatises were authoritative. Unfortunately, as we shall see later, the sects do not quite agree as to what is meant by the eleven Aṅga and the fourteen Pūrva, so that the work of the famous council of Pāṭaliputra did not carry the weight which Sthūlabhadra hoped it would have done.
During this period not only was Jainism established in the south and the canon of the Scriptures fixed in the north, but also the famous clothes-versus-nudity question was raised, never again to be laid. We are told that, when at last the famine was over and the real head of the order, Bhadrābahu or his successor, could bring some of his travelled mendicants back from the south to the original home of their order, he found that the home-keeping minority had all adopted some form of clothing; and, though the actual schism did not take place until two more centuries had passed, the unity of the order was lost for ever, and any whole-hearted agreement on such a question as the canon of their scriptures was never again possible.
As the Jaina laity had been drawn away from Hinduism by their adhesion to Mahāvīra, they were left without any stated worship. Gradually, however, reverence for their master and for other teachers, historical and mythical, passed into adoration and took the form of a regular cult. Finally, images of these adored personages were set up for
