ABSTRACT
The medieval hagiographers appear to acknowledge Haribhadra’s interest in Buddhism by turning him into a scourge of the Buddhists and, in a story which does not appear to antedate the twelfth century, they describe his violent revenge on the Buddhists who had killed his nephews (see Chapter 5). Such a story may have been intended to ‘reclaim’ Haribhadra fully as a prominent Jain teacher at a time when Jainism was trying to establish a firm identity to facilitate conversions which might otherwise have been jeopardised through an excessive stress on relativism.36 Unquestionably the account of the murdered nephews has a great deal in common with the hagiography of the great Digambara Akalan≥ka, whose writings were of vital importance in the creation of a near-definitive Jain epistemology and logic achieved largely through incisive controversions of Buddhist logicians such as Dharmak⁄rti (seventh century). It was also during the medieval period that the story began to circulate that Haribhadra had written the ‘Extension of Play’ to bring back to Jainism a monk who had been studying Buddhism so intently that he had begun to be convinced by it.37
