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JAINA LITERATURE IN TAMIL
whole tradition is fictitious and was created by some fertile imagination. The same author Mr. Sivaraja Pillai, referred to above, after an elaborate discussion about the Sangam tradition, writes thusa -
“Reasons so many and substantial as these should lead any fair-minded scholar to reject the Sangam tradition as entirely apocryphal and not deserving of any serious historical consideration. It will, however, furnish a chapter in the study of myths and the psychological tendencies of the age in which it arose. Though worthless as testifying to any objective facts of Tamil history, the tradition itself claims our notice as a phenomenon of a certain type at a particular period of a nation's thought. I strongly suspect whether the eighth century tradition is not after all a faint reflex of the earlier Sangam movement of the Jains. We have testimony to the fact that one Vajranandi a Jain Grammarian and Scholar and the pupil of Dēvanandi Pūjyapāda, an accomplished Jaina Sanskrit Grammarian, in the Kanarese country, of the sixth century A.D., and the author of a grammatical treatise, “Jainēndra', one of the eight principal authorities on Sanskrit Grammar, went over to Madurā with the object of founding a Sangam there. Of course, that “Sangam' could not have been anything else than a college of Jain ascetics and scholars engaged in a religious propaganda of their own. This movement
1. Sce M. S. Ramaswami Ayyangar : op. cit., pp. 161-66, App. c: The so-called Sangam Age.
2. K. N. Sivaraja Pillai : op cit., pp. 26-27.
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