The Sthavirāvalī

The second part of the Kalpasūtra is a genealogy. Mahāvīra had eleven gaṇadharas leading nine gaṇas, four thousand two hundred monks between them; and then the text says the thing the whole list turns on: "the Nirgrantha śramaṇas of the present time are all spiritual descendants of the monk Ārya Sudharman." Ten lines of pupils, and one of them continued.

From Sudharman the string runs down through thirty-nine elders, each named with his gotra, some in pairs — Bhadrabāhu with Sambhūtavijaya, Suhastin with Mahāgiri — to Kṣamāśramaṇa Devarddhi, in whose time the canon that had been carried by memory for nearly a thousand years was written down at Valabhī.

Off the trunk hang the branches. Bhadrabāhu's pupil Godāsa founded a gaṇa; Mahāgiri's pupils another; Suhastin's twelve pupils six more — eight gaṇas in all, each opening into four śākhās, with twenty-seven kulas between them. The long redaction names every one. That is the map: a tree read from the crown down, with the year it was closed at the root.

The Kalpasūtra gives the order and nothing else. The three years on the map — Jambū the last kevalī at 64 years after Mahāvīra, Bhadrabāhu's death at 170, Valabhī at 980 — are the paṭṭāvalī tradition and are marked as such. No other elder is dated.