Sthulabhadra

The council

With Bhadrabahu absent in the south and the community scattered by famine, the mendicants who remained in Magadha are said to have assembled at Pataliputra to recite and record what each could recall of the teaching. What they recovered became the eleven Angas; the twelfth, containing the Purvas, could not be reconstructed.

Sthulabhadra is said to have travelled to Bhadrabahu to learn the Purvas directly, and to have received ten of the fourteen in full and the remaining four in wording only, without their meaning — a qualification the tradition preserves carefully, since it marks the exact point at which the transmission became incomplete.

Narrative

A well-known story concerns his early life: son of a minister at the Nanda court, he spent twelve years with the courtesan Kosa before renouncing, and afterwards returned to spend a rainy season in her house, remaining celibate and converting her. The episode is used in Jain teaching as a demonstration of restraint under maximum temptation, and contrasts with accounts of other mendicants who avoided such tests rather than passing them.

Significance

Sthulabhadra matters chiefly for the council. The Svetambara canon traces its authority through him to Mahavira, and the Digambara rejection of that canon is in effect a rejection of the claim that what Pataliputra recovered was adequate. He is thus, with Bhadrabahu, one of the two figures on whom the question of Jain scripture turns.