ABSTRACT
He points, for example, to the basic problem that the earliest accounts of Lon≥kå are given by opponents such as Dharmasågara, the Tapå Gaccha polemicist, who lived some time after him and that none of his contemporary followers produced any sort of biography of their teacher. Moreover, the Sthånakvås⁄s spurned the biographical tradition of the Lon≥kå Gaccha, the lineage which claimed immediate descent from him, on the grounds of its lax behaviour and betrayal of its founder’s teachings, and they did not themselves start writing seriously about Lon≥kå until the beginning of the nineteenth century. As a result, there is no clear tradition even about the date of Lon≥kå’s birth (it could be anywhere from 1418 to 1425) or his place of birth, which Jñånsundar considers on the balance of evidence to have been Limb∂⁄ rather than Ahmedabad (other sources suggest Siroh⁄ in what is now south Rajasthan). Jñånsundar further argues that the key source for the construction of the standard Sthånakvås⁄ picture of Lon≥kå as a great and unusual personage, a biography supposedly dating from the sixteenth century and written by a Tapå Gaccha monk, is on linguistic and circumstantial grounds most likely a forgery.
