The Canon

The Śvetāmbara scriptures are called āgama, what has come down. At their core stand the twelve aṅgas, given sizes in padas that double from one to the next — 18,000 for the Ācārāṅga to 1,84,32,000 for the Vipākaśruta — a straight staircase on a scale that doubles. The twelfth step is missing: the Dṛṣṭivāda was lost a thousand years after Mahāvīra, and with it the fourteen pūrvas, whose size the tradition gives in the ink it would take to write them, one elephant-load doubling to 8,192. Around the aṅgas the canon grew to forty-five books in six kinds, or thirty-two for those who leave the miscellanies aside; three councils settled it, and the last, at Valabhī, wrote it down. The atlas draws the surviving staircase, the lost one in outline beside it, the forty-five by kind, and the councils on a line — with every series marked as the commentators' or the tradition's. Follows the Śvetāmbara reckoning throughout.

All of it is also walkable as an interactive atlas of nested maps.