As ascetics,31 the Śramaṇas (Buddhists) owned little more than a simple robe and a few other necessities. Thus did Gautama Śākamuni, ‘sage of the Scythians’, wander, meditating and searching for answers, before his “awakening”. He may well have met others doing the same thing, and studied with some of them, but we have no remotely credible evidence that he knew anything about Jains, Ājīvikas, or other non-Brahmanist sects. The traditional view, which actually accepts this problematic notion as dogma, has not been seriously questioned for a long time. Yet these sects are unattested in any dated or datable Pre-Normative Buddhist sources. It is because their teachings needed to be refuted and rejected by much later Buddhists that they eventually appeared in the written Buddhist tradition, but in works that are patently late doctrinally, full of magic and other forms of fantasy, and unreliable in every other way. Chronological incongruities reveal that the putatively “early” forms of what eventually became identifiably Jain, Ājīvika, and so on, did not yet exist as such anywhere near the time of the Buddha, but took on recognizable forms only much later due to heavy influence from Normative Buddhism, therefore no earlier than the Saka-Kushan period.
~Beckwith, Christopher I.. Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (pp. 70-71). Princeton University Press
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