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JAINA LITERATURE IN TAMIL
109
that there are more things not dreamt of in his philosophy.
Thus ends the work after vindicating first the reality of the spiritual principle, the human personality and secondly the supremacy of the religious doctrine based upon ahimsa. Thus Nilakēsi completes her life-task which she intended to be a thanks-offering to her guru from whom she learnt the fundamental principles of religion and philosophy which she adopted as her own, though she, as a Goddess, had been revelling in animal sacrifice. Thus we see that Nilakesi is mainly a controversial work intended to vindicate the reality of the soul against materialism, the nobility of ahimsā against Vēdic ritualism, and the dietetic purity of vegetarianism against the Buddhists who preached ahimsā and practised himsä.
We know absolutely nothing about the author of the text though we know that the commentary is written by Vamana-muni. Since there are references to the Kural and the Nalaḍiyar in this work it must be later than the age of the Kural. Since it is intended as an answer to Kundalakēši it must certainly be later than Kuṇḍalakësi1.
Since we know nothing about Kundalakēsi itself we cannot build much on this information. All that
1. The learned author elsewhere (Neelakesi, Kumbakonam, 1936, pp. 5-11) assigns the anonymous author to a period between the fourth and fifth century A.D., but says "We cannot afford to dogmatically assert anything about the age of the author of Neclakesi."
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