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T Holy Åbu is domical inside, shows, in the ring next to the central pendant, an achārya sitting on a simhāsana with the sthāpanā in front and shrāvakas hearing his discourse. ..
(10) The second bay also has a domical ceiling supported by beams at the end of the peripheri. The inner face of one of them is divided into two panels, one above the other, the lower panel showing a row of elephants. The upper panel represents the story of Ardrakumāra who imparted right knowledge to an elephant (Fig. 6).
In his previous existence, Ārdrakumāra took dikşhā (initiation) as a Jaina monk, along with his wife. Once, upon seeing his wife (now a nun), his mind was attracted towards her and he died before performing the prescribed expiation for such a sin. When he was reborn as Prince Ardrakumāra, son of king Ārdraka, a ruler of the non-Aryan Ārdraka country, he once contracted friendship with Prince Abhayakumāra, the son of King Shreņika (Bimbisāra, c. 6th cent., B.C.) of Magadha. Abhaya gave him a gift of an image of a Jina, at the sight of which Ārdraka-kumāra obtained knowledge of his previous existence whereupon his mind turned away from worldly attachments. Leaving his native land and entering the Aryan country, he became a Jaina monk himself without formal initiation by a teacher. On his way to the spot where the Lord Mahāvīra was then staying, obviously going with a view to pay his respects to the Tīrthařkara,-five hundred robbers seized him but he could convert them and initiated them as Jaina monks. Then passing through a dense forest, he came upon a hermitage of tāpasas (non-Jaina monks ) who believed that eating various fruits etc. ( with innumerable living bacteria in them ) involved much more himsā (sin of killing) than killing one elephant for food which would be himsā of one life only and would last for a
