________________
ALAM
LIL
JAINISMA IN
SOUTH
The entry of Jainism
(A note on the general in South India still con.
course of Jaina histo tinues to be an obscura
ry in the South, and problem notwithstanding
not meant to be the great advance made
anything more in historical research wit
than that.) hin recent years. The
By Rajasevasaktha earliest monuments of
Rao Bahadur Dr. antiquity connected with
S. Krishnaswami these happen to be a
Aiyangar, M. A, PH.D. number of cave dwellings with or without images of Jaina Tirtankaras scattered all over the land and giving indubitable evidence of age. The principal element in the determination of the age consists in a certain number of inscriptions, giving no more than the names of Jaina saints, sometimes found written adjacent to the seats or beds cut out in rock caves. The Brahmi script in which these inscriptions are written seam referable to the century before Christ and the first century or the second following Christ. In that period Jains must have come into the South, and must have lived in various localities more or less as hermits living in uninhabited, or little inhabited, forest abodes. This perhaps lends colour to the tra•dition that is current that Bhadrabahu retired to the South, as the result of a famine, from Magadha in the last years of Chandragupta, and the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta himself is traditionally regarded as having followed the immigrant party. The two statements may be regarded separately without the one proving necessarily the actual occurrence of the other. The evidence so far available for the prevalence of Jainism in South India is not of a character to throw any direct light upon Chandragupta's association. The advent of Bhadrabahu however may be inferred therefrom with perhaps greater probability.
Shatabdi Granth ]
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