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ANDHRA KARNATA JAINISM.
Jainism and worldly realism.
dark as the great rainclouds filled with water ; abounding with wild boars, panthers, tigers, bears, h'yeňas, serpents and deer ; filled with caves, caverns, l'arge 'ravines and forests."
The dwellers of such mountain regions, generally inaccessible to man or beast, however, became the fellers of the forest and the controllers of river-courses. These Jaina colonists coming down into South India in large groups, sometimes of 500 each, selected for their residence beautiful river banks and deep forest recesses redolent of the fragrance of creeper and flower and rich with the beauties of varicgated landscape, so that they might imbibe their balm and assimilate themselves to the creative forces of nature as a first step to their gradual assimilation to the Arhats. Some such idea is discernible through the conventionalised description of the aspect of Kuntala dēsa, a famous resort of Jaina ascetics, occurring in an early Kannada inscription of S.S. 1130 from one of the present Andhra-Karnāta districts. The Brahmānda Purāna mentions the Nirgranthas among the early South Indian set:tlers known to the writers of Aryavarta. The forest recesses of the Andhra dēsa revealed to the illuminating gaze of these scholarly immigrants either virgin lands untouched by the feet of the unhallowed or ruins of former human habitation,-the traces of the achievement and decay of an 'earlier generation of Indian population. They no doubt dealt with these regions
