Within the Jain tradition, the Agamas are understood not as the product of a single author, but as the systematic preservation of Mahavira’s spoken teachings by his immediate disciples. These chief disciples, known as Ganadharas, are said to have organized and orally composed his sermons into a coherent body of scripture. In this sense, the Ganadharas did not claim independent authorship; rather, they served as faithful transmitters and arrangers of what Mahavira taught. The Agamas thus emerge as a collective spiritual endeavor, rooted in the living presence of a teacher and the attentive receptivity of his disciples.

Over time, these orally transmitted teachings were gathered and codified within the Jain community. According to the Śvetāmbara tradition, a decisive moment in this process occurred at the Council of Vallabhi, where the Agamas were compiled and edited under the leadership of Acharya Devardhigani Kshamashramana. This council is placed many centuries after Mahavira’s nirvana, reflecting a long period during which the teachings were preserved and recited from memory before being fixed in written form. The resulting Śvetāmbara canon represents the culmination of this sustained effort to safeguard the spiritual message attributed to Mahavira.

The Digambara tradition, however, offers a more austere assessment of this history. It maintains that the original teachings were lost a few centuries after Mahavira’s passing and therefore does not accept the Śvetāmbara Agamas as authentic. From this perspective, what survives in later scriptures is a secondary reflection rather than the pristine word of the Jina. Digambara communities thus look instead to other texts, composed by later acharyas, as vehicles for conveying the core insights of the tradition. In both perspectives, the story of the Agamas reveals how a community wrestles with memory, loss, and preservation in its effort to remain true to a founding spiritual vision.