Ajivika

·期刊原文
Ajivika
Charpentier, Jarl

The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

1913.07

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p.669

In his admirable treatise upon the Ajivikas in
Hastings' Encyclopcedia of Religion and Ethics, i, p.
259 seq., Dr. Hoernle writes as follows: ': On the
exact signification of the name ' Ajivika' we have no
information." However, he thinks it probable that the
name was not originally taken up by the followers of
the heresiarch Gosala themselves, but was from the
beginning a nickname given to them by their opponents
and meant to denote them as practising ascetic rules
only as a means of gaining a livelihood (ajiva). So
ajivika would mean "professional" or something like
that.

It cannot be denied that this seems to be the
most probable explanation of this rather obscure
word. Nor do I pretend to be in a position to offer a
better one. But

-----------------------
1 I have compared, with Mr. Allan's assistance, some
of the coins of Phraates in the British Museum
with the Kushan. The only distinctive letters I
could find common to both were the alpha and
epsilon. The Kushan letters appeared to me sharper
and more angular; more italianted, as our writing
masters would have said. The epsilon in particular
sometimes resembled a cuneiform wedge, a form
which is occasionally found in Egyptian graffiti.

p.670

I think it is at least highly probable that the
term in question goes back to a more remote antiquity
than that of Gosala, who was, as is well known, the
contemporary of Mahavira the Jina and Gotama the
Buddha.

The verb a-jiv- we meet with at first in the
Mahabharata, but the noun ajaiva-, "livelihood, "
"mode of life," occurs in texts certainly much older
than the great epic poem.(l) So we find sarvajivca-
in the Svetasvatara Up., i, 6, and samyag-ajiva- (cf.
samma-ajiva-) is well known to designate one of the
stations of the "noble eightfold path " in the sacred
lore of the Buddhists. In Buddhist scriptures, too,
ajivika as the name of heterodox ascetics is
frequently met with, e.g. Vinaya Pitaka, i, 8 =
Majjh. Nik. i, 170; Vin. Pit;. ii, 130, 284, etc.;
but the name of Gosala is not mentioned in connexion
with it. It is only from Jain canonical books that we
learn that Gosala was the head of the ajiviyas
mentioned there. As for the epigraphical mentions of
the word ajivika, the first of which date from the
time of Asoka and his successor Dasaratha, they have
been dealt with at length by Dr. Hoernle in his
treatise, p. 266 seq.

Now the founder of the sect of the Ajivikas is,
as is well known, called by the Jains Gosala,
Mamkhaliputta, and by the Buddhists Makkhali Gosala
(Skt. Maskarin Gosala or Gosalikaputra). That Gosala
was his real name, and makkhali (:mamkhali)(2) =
maskarin denotes him as belonging by birth to a
certain sect of mendicant friars, has been shown at
length by Dr. Hoernle. He goes on to state that
maskarin means an ascetic carrying a single
bamboo-staff (maskara), and that Gosala therefore
belonged to the sect of mendicants usually called
eka-dandins, who were, as we know, orthodox Saivas.

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1 Of course, I owe the following indications to the
St. Petersburg Dictionary and to the article by
Dr. Hoernle already mentioned.
2 Makkhali, because of the change of r into l, must,
of course, belong to an Eastern dialect, probably
the Magadhi.

p.671

The early existence of such maskara-carrying monks
is, as Dr. Hoernle points out, ascertained not only
by the name Mamkhaliputta, but also by Panini vi, 1,
154 (maskaramaskarinau venuparivrajakayoh), where he
explains the formation of the word maskarin.(1) And
Mamkhaliputta may, of course, he regarded as a noun
of the same kind as Nigganthaputta or Sakiyaputta,
names of the followers of Mahavira, the Niggantha,
and Gotama, the great ascetic of the royal house of
Sakyas.

But this statement, being quite clear to us,
seems not to have been so to the author of the
Bhagavatisutra (p. 1204; v. Dr. Hoernle's
Uvasagadasao, App. i, p. 1); for lie states that
Gosala was called Mamkhaliputta, as being the son of
Mamkhali, a mamkha or wandering mendicant. Abhayadeva
explains mamkha as being "a mendicant who tries to
get alms from the people by showing them pictures of
(malignant) deities which he carried about with
him".(2) Now--to go further with Dr. Hoernle-- there
is no real word mamkha that could make good this
explanation, moreover, the real meaning of that
presumably invented word was not very clear to
Abhayadeva and Hemacandra. So we must surely put this
explanation aside and hold to the view that Gosala's
father was rather a maskarin, a mendicant carrying
one staff of bamboo, an eka-dandin. But I think that
if the word mamkha was really only a blunder of
Abhayadeva, his statement concerning the carrying of
a picture of a certain uglylooking deity might be
quite right, as I hope to show in the following.

From Panini, v, 3, 99 (jivikarthe capanye), and
the explanations of Patanjali and others, we learn
that a picture of Siva or some other deity(3) that
was fabricated for sale

----------------------
1 As for Patanjali's explanation of this sutra
(M.Bh. iii, p. 96) see Weber, Ind. Stud. ii, 174
f., quoted by Dr. Hoernle.
2 Hemacandra in the commentary upon
Abhidhanacintamani, v, 795, says that mamkha was =
magadha, "a bard."
3 Patanjali mentions Skanda and Visakha too.

p.672

should be called Sivaka, while another picture of
the same god carried about by a devalaka(1) and shown
to the people for earning money was called simply
Siva. I do not wish to enter into an investigration
of these grammatical subtleties and their various
explanations, which have been fully discussed by the
late Professor Ludwig in a paper inserted in the
Festgruss an R. von Roth, p. 57 seq. But I wish to
lay stress upon the fact that according to this sutra
Panini must have been well accustomed to the
profession of carrying about idols for the purpose of
earning money. And such a mode of life must have been
rather traditional at his time, as the grammarians
had already been able to make such nice distinctions
as to the various uses of e.g. Siva and Sivaka, when
the words were used to denote these pictures. I think
it rather clear that the explanation of Abhayadeva
quoted above points to the same fact as is told by
Panini. And if, as seems highly probable, we must fix
the date of the famous grammarian at an earlier
period than has been done hitherto we might suppose
that his statement may be nearly contemporary with
the life of Gosala.

Now, it is of interest, too, that just Siva
should be used here for exemplifying the rule of
Panini, and that the other examples are Skanda and
Visakha, who are both very closely connected with
Siva. For from these indications we might perhaps
conclude that the " malignant " deity which Gosala's
father, the Mamkhali, was carrying about, must have
been just the same Siva of whom ugly-looking and
terrible pictures may, after all, have been known
since very old times in India. And in relation to
this conjecture I might perhaps also lay stress on
the fact that ajivika seems to be sometimes used as

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1 Devalaka or devala was a man who gained his
livelihood by carrying about idols and showing
them to the people (schol. ad Pan. v, 3, 99;
M.Bh.). Cf. Amarakosa, ii, 10, 11, devajivi tu
devalah. He was also called a daivalaka (Har. 150)
or bhauta (SKDr.).

p.673

a synonym of eka-dandin, a, Saiva ascetic, and
that the maskarin of Panini, vi, 1, 154 (and
Patanjali upon that sutra) can scarcely have been
anything but such a Saiva ascetic carrying one staff.

I adduced in the Vienna Journal, vol. xxiii, p.
151 seq., and vol. xxv, p. 355 seq., several facts,
that seemed to me to prove Siva-worship to have been
of considerable importance in Eastern India already
in pre-Buddhistic times. And perhaps we might see
here another instance pointing to the same
suggestions that I made there. Of course, nothing
certain call be ascertained from these few lines
concerning the original meaning and use of the word
ajivika, but I may venture to think, perhaps, that it
dates from the time before Buddha, and designated
originally an ascetic of the same kind as Gosala's
father, a mendicant friar belonging to some Saiva
sect.

There is another small observation too that might
perhaps lend some moreweight to my hypothesis, though
I confess most willingly it is a rather uncertain
one. The Vin. pit. i, 8 tells us that Gotama, on his
way from Gaya immediately after his enlightenment,
met with a certain Upaka, a mendicant friar, whom the
text calls an ajivika. If now it is almost certain
that Buddha died at the age of 80 about 480 B.C., and
was accordingly born about 560 B.C., this must have
passed about 525 B.C., for we know from the canonical
texts that in his 36th year he became a Buddha. Now
Dr. Hoernle has with much probability calculated that
Gosala died about B.C. 500-- I should rather think a
little later--and the Bhagavati states that he
founded his order of mendicants at Savatthi sixteen
years before his death. If these calculations could
be proved, this Upaka, whom the Vinaya Pitaka calls
an ajivaka, was certainly not a disciple of Gosala:
but belonged to a sect previous to his. I readily
confess that not much importance can be ascribed to
these uncertain chronological calculations; but I
think the

p.674

statement of the Vinaya Pitaka may be viewed in
connexion with the fact that the Buddhists never
denote the ajivikas as real followerrs of
Gosala. Thus, it might perhaps obtain some little
more probability.

After all, I have only wished with these few
remarks to try to prove that ajivaka originally had
nothing to do with Gosala especially, but was a much
older name designating a sect to which he originally
belonged and afterwards transferred to his disciples,