Buhler Reads the Mathura Inscriptions and Proves the Jains Are Ancient

Jain studies examines Jain scripture, doctrine and community history, establishing what a specific teaching or practice's actual textual basis is and how it is understood across the tradition's Digambara and Svetambara branches. The Austrian Indologist Georg Buhler read his essay on the Jaina sect before the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Vienna in 1887, using a large body of dedicatory inscriptions from Mathura, dated to the Indo-Scythian period, to demonstrate for the first time on hard epigraphic evidence that Jainism was a genuinely ancient tradition with its own documented monastic schools rather than a late offshoot of Buddhism, as many contemporary scholars had assumed.

Buhler's inscription based method, checking what a Jain doctrine or lineage claim is actually attested to in dated stone rather than assuming its antiquity from later tradition alone, is the standard Jain studies still applies. The atlas relies on the discipline wherever a Jain teaching's age or scriptural basis is described, and wherever the Digambara and Svetambara branches diverge in reading the same tradition, distinguishing what the epigraphic and manuscript record actually supports from either community's own retrospective account.