the distance in time of the questionable date from either limit by the greater or less resemblance of the oldest Gaina works in verse with such of the Southern and Northern Buddhists as regards metrical or stylistic peculiarities, we should place the beginning of the Gaina literature nearer the time of the Pali literature, rather than that of the Northern Buddhists. This result agrees pretty well with a tradition of the Svetambaras. For they say that after the twelve years' famine, while Bhadrabahu was the head of the church, the Angas were brought together by the Sangha of Pataliputra. Now Bhadrabahu's death is placed 170 AV. by the Svetambaras, and 162 AV. by the Digambaras; he lived therefore, according to the former, under Kandragupta, who is said to have ascended the throne 155 AV. Professor Max Muller assigns to Kandragupta the dates 315-291 B.C.; Westergaard prefers 320 B.C. as a more likely date for Kandragupta, and so does Kern . However this difference matters little: the date of the collection or, perhaps more correctly, the composition of the Gaina canon would fall somewhere about the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third century B.C. It is worth noticing, that according to the above-cited tradition, the Sangha of Pataliputra collected the eleven Angas without the assistance of Bhadrabahu. As the latter is claimed by the Digambaras for one of their teachers, and as the Svetambaras, though doing the same, still continue the list of Sthaviras from Sambhutavigaya, Bhadrabahu's fellow Sthavira, not from Bhadrabahu himself, it seems to follow that the Angas, brought together by the Sangha of Pataliputra, formed the canon of the Svetambaras only, not that of the whole Gaina church. In that case we should not go wrong in placing the date of the canon somewhat later, under the patriarchate of Sthulabhadra, i.e. in the first part of the third century B.C.

If the result of our preceding inquiry deserves credit--and I see no counter arguments entitling us to mistrust our conclusion--the origin of the extant Gaina literature cannot be placed earlier than about 300 B.C., or two centuries after