________________
GLEANINGS
SG
**
88
*
“The Jainas were great scholars of language, grammar, astrology, earth-engineering, mathematics and philosophy. They taught all castes liberally and did not exclude ladies. The rocky testimony to a Jaina university at Rayadurgam is as glorious as it is unmistakable. It would have been started in the Rastrukuta times on the hill in the Jaina establishment near the small but perennial spring and would have carried on till some years after the fateful battle of Raksasatagdi. On the hill we see an old Jaina temple facing the north, whose śikhara is assembled from undressed slab-stones. Proceeding further, we get down to reach a huge boulder rising like a building under the shade of the banyan trees. On this boulder, at a height of about ten feet, we see the figures of three-one, and three, Jaina teachers or Tirthankaras carved in rows at three different places. These signify three separate departments of teaching in that university...... Below these Tirthankara figures we
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org