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Bhadrabāhu and the Sravanabelgola Kşetra
23
religion Buddhism from India, begin with the Nāya mār-s and Āļvār-s in Tamilnād in the 7th century? If we would want to know something about the view of life of the ancient Dravidians, then the first thing we ought to do is to examine the oldest Dravidian literature available, the so-called cankam-literature in Tamil of which the earliest extant poems are dated AD 100-200": the subject-matter of this literature is love and war, and the values of the people were purely secular. If ever there was such a thing as a "Drāvidadharma", then probably it was some form of theism. It is usually extremely difficult, and especially so in India, to ascribe traits of religious or philosophical thought to this or that ethnic group. From the cankam- poems we can conclude that for the ancient Tamils the world was not full of sorrow at all, but the contrary seemed much more the case. No one has ever provided evidence that the doctrines of karma and rebirth are nonAryan and could not have developed from ideas which we find in the Veda." So here we have Prof. Mehta writing about "Drāvidadharma", which is totally a figment of his imagination, and giving it some of the characteristics of Jainism which are non-Vedic. Then he apparently believes that whatever is non-Vedic is non-Aryan. His next leap into the dark is that whatever is non-Aryan must have a Dravidian origin.
To conclude this survey, we may say that at the present state of scholarly research, the essentials of southern tradition about Bhadrabāhu and his Migration to southern Karnataka may be thought of as true, and it is most probable that it was this śrutakevalin who brought Jainism to South India. With this in mind, it easily becomes clear to us why Sravanabelgola ought to be considered the holiest place of Jainism in the south.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
It is the orthodox Digambara belief that after Bhadrabahu, who was the leader of the Jaina church, had led part of the community to the south, the other part in the north began to adopt other practices under the heavy stress of their difficult circumstances, such as the wearing of clothing by monks. As Bhadrabā hu was a srutakevalin, and hence had full knowledge of the right doctrine, the orthodox Digambara-s consider the Svetāmbara practices as deviations from the original
teachings of the Tirtha nkara-s. 2. The Svetā mbara-s say Bhadrabāhu was the second last, and name Sthūlabhadra as the last
Srutakevalin. See The Kalpasů tra of Bhadraba hu, ed. Hermann Jacobi, introduction pp. 10, 11, in
Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, VII. Band, No. 1, Leipzig 1879. 3. B. A. Saletore, Mediaeval Jainism, Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House, 1938 (?), p. 4 4. Saletore, op. cit. p. 185. 5. Hermann Jacobi, Ueber die Entstehung der Svetambara and Digambara Sektan in Zeitschrift der
Deutschen Morgenljindischen Gesellschaft, vol. 38 (1884), pp. 1-42. 6. itas ca tasmin duşkale karale kälaratrivat
nirvahärtham sådhusanghas tiran niranidher yayau || IX, 55 // 7. Edition of the text included in Jacobi (1884). 8. Text ibid., pp. 2-4.
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