Valabhi

Valabhi began as a provincial seat under the Guptas and became an independent capital when the Maitraka general Bhatarka took power in the late fifth century, ruling Saurashtra and much of Gujarat until an invasion ended the line in the eighth. Its copper plate grants, of which a large number survive, are among the better documented land records of early medieval India and show the court endowing Buddhist monasteries, Brahmanical temples and Jain establishments within the same reigns.

Chinese pilgrims describe a Buddhist university there. Xuanzang in the seventh century reports hundreds of monasteries and thousands of resident monks of the Sammitiya school, and Yijing, writing later, names Valabhi and Nalanda together as the two places a student in India would go for advanced study. The court itself was for the most part Shaiva. The city fell in the eighth century, in an attack usually attributed to Arab forces operating out of Sind, and was not reoccupied. What survives is a brick mound beside the small town of Vala, excavated only in part, with the copper plates and the pilgrims' accounts carrying almost everything that is known about it. The copper plates are also the reason the city can be dated at all. Each grant opens with a genealogy of the ruling house and a date in the Valabhi era, and setting them in sequence produces a king list and a chronology for the dynasty that no chronicle supplies, which is why a mound with almost nothing standing has a better documented political history than many towns that are still inhabited.

Svetambara Jain tradition holds that the scriptures preached by Mahavira were transmitted orally for centuries and were badly damaged by famine and by the deaths of the monks who carried them. Two recovery councils were held, one at Mathura under Arya Skandila and one at Valabhi under Nagarjunasuri, at about the same time and without contact between them, and they produced recensions that did not agree.

A later assembly at Valabhi, presided over by Devarddhigani Kshamashramana and traditionally dated 980 or 993 years after the liberation of Mahavira, reconciled the two and committed the result to writing. That event is why the Svetambara canon exists as a written body of texts at all, and the dating formula, counted from Mahavira rather than from any imperial era, is itself evidence of how the community reckoned time.

The Digambaras reject the whole account. They hold that the original teaching was lost entirely within a few centuries and that no surviving text is scripture in the strict sense, which is one of the deepest differences between the two communities and not merely a disagreement about clothing. The atlas records the Svetambara account as the tradition's own and sets the Digambara position beside it without deciding between them.