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A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF JAINISM
Since this inscription is a forged document of eighth or ninth century, we cannot rely on its evidence and accept the list of monks as persons belonging to the days of early Ganga rulers. Other details given in this grant should also be ignored.
Avinīta's son and successor Durvinīta ruled, in all probability, in the second half of the sixth century AD. Like his father, he too had a long reign."14 We must remember that the great-grandson of Durvinita, Bhūvikrama, started ruling from AD 625.115 Durvinita must therefore be placed before AD 600. This is confirmed partly by the discovery of a mutilated manuscript of the Avantīsundarikathā 16 which makes Durvinīta a contemporary of Simhavişnu. We have already seen that Durvinita's father, Avinīta, was a contemporary of Simhavisnu. It would therefore appear that Avinīta's son was a junior contemporary of that Pallava monarch.117
No Jaina inscription of the reign of Durvinita has yet been discovered but a later record, dated Saka 977 (AD 1055) of the time of Someśvara I, the Kalyāņa-Cālukya monarch, refers to a temple dedicated to Pārsva, which according to it, was built by Durvinīta. 118 This definitely proves that Durvinīta, like many of his predecessors, patronized the Jainas.
A few scholars are of the firm opinion that Durvinita was a disciple of the great Jaina savant Pujyapāda. The basis of their surmise is one of his records, dated in his fortieth regnal year.119 According to this inscription he composed a work called the Sabdāvatāra. 120 Prof. Saletore argues121 that Durvinīta merely put into Kannada the original Sabdāvatāra, a grammatical treatise written by Pujyapāda, but this is mere conjecture. We must remember that according to Devasena (ap 933), Vajranandi, the founder of Drāvida Samgha, who flourished about AD 468, at Madura was a disciple of Pūjyapāda. We have however already seen that Durvinīta could not have flourished before the second half of the sixth century AD; and Pūjyapāda must have died at least 50 years before Durvinīta's probable date of birth. There is therefore no basis for the view that Durvinita was a disciple of Pujyapāda. It is however just possible that sometime after Pujyapäda's death, Durvinita, on his own initiative, translated the grammatical treatise of that Jaina savant.
In a later chapter I shall continue this discussion on the state of Jainism during the rule of the later western Ganga rulers. Let us now turn our attention to the condition of the Jaina religion in the Kadamba kingdom from the earliest times.
