ABSTRACT
The range of divergent practices found within the Svetambara Jain community in the early centuries of the second millennium CE would not have impinged greatly on the attention of an outsider. The medieval Jain lineage genealogies in no way abrogated the chronological dimension in favour of temporal vagueness. The theme of the great teacher who appears at a moment of moral crisis to restore the primordial values of the path is a narrative trope in many religious traditions. The mighty vacaka Devabhadra was one whose intellect had been cleansed in the ocean which is the totality of true religious impulse. The model of royal genealogy shaped both the form and substance of Jain histories, although its tendency to make a cosmological equation between the origin of a dynasty and the beginnings of the universe was not emulated in the renunciant context.
