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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
BUDDHISM IN KASHMIR
39
who was devoted to him (i.e., Avalokitesvara) made yonder shrine excellent with burnt bricks. Anno 73 the 5th day of the bright half of Mārgasirsa."
In this inscription Prof. Sten Konow traces the reference made by Kalhana to the burning of Hādigrāma in the reign of Jayasimha (VIII. 1586). He reads the date as 4273 corresponding to the 16th November 1197. Before his survey Pandit Kasi Ram also had traced some ruins of temples in this village (Stein, I, p. 50 n.).
In the Archaeological Survey Reports of 1915-16, Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni published an account of the explorations carried on by him. He discovered Buddhist monuments at Parihāsapura, Puraņādhisthāna (mod. Pandrethan) and Hushkapura while Vogel found remains of a Buddhist stūpa near a village called Malangpura, three miles south-west of Avantipura.
Pandit R. C. Kak while in charge of the archaeological department of Kashmir collected several images of Buddha, Bodhisattvas, Buddhist gods and goddesses, fragments of stūpas and railings and several earthen jars and pots, some of the large sized jars bearing inscriptions in early Gupta characters. But his greatest discovery is the ruins at Harwan (Shadhradvana), said to have been once the seat of Nāgārjuna. In his work the Ancient Monuments of Kashmir, he furnishes us with an account of the sculptures, architectural style, artistic values of the finds, of which the following are Buddhistic:
(1) the temple at Pandrethan the old capital founded by
Asoka and referred to by Kalhaņa as Srīnagari (pp.
114-6); (ii) the stūpa of the mediaeval period at Malangpura, first
noticed by Vogel, on which the remnants of sculptured reliefs depict a furious monster pursuing a man who is Alying precipitately before it” (p. 125);
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