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thought and moulding the monastic traditions of its teachers. Except for one or two legendary accounts of doubtful authenticity, recorded in later literary treatises, not many historical facts are known regarding the origin of the Yapaniya sect. Still, we may take it as fairly certain that this sect was founded in the early centuries of the Christian Era soon after the division of the Jaina church into the Svētāmbara and Digambara orders and that the early provenance of this sect was somewhere in the northern region of Karnataka. A large number of allusions to the Yapaniyas found in the epigraphs of the Kannada country as contrasted with their almost total absence in other regions, shows that the Yapaniyas were, rather exclusively, a product of Karnataka Jainism and that they grew from strength to strength and developed several monastic orders of their own, encouraged by the ruling class and supported by the sections of the populace in many parts of Karnataka from the age of the fifth to the fourteenth century A. D. But it is rather curious to find at the same time that the Yapaniya teachers figure very rarely in the inscriptions of the southernmost parts of Karnataka including Mysore. No preceptor of the Yapaniya order is mentioned in the epigraphs of Sravana Belgola, at least in an explicit manner.
JAINISM IN SOUTH INDIA
As a result of the researches conducted during the past half a century and over, existence of the preceptors of the Yapaniya sect has been revealed in the following places: 1) Āḍaki, Sēḍam and Tengali in the Gulbarga District of the Hyderabad State. This is known from the epigraphs edited in Part II of the Jaina Epigraphs (author's collection). 2) Honnur, Kāgavāḍ, Kolhapur and Rayabag in the Kolhapur region. 3) Badli, Belgaum, Eksambi, Halsi, Hannikeri, Hukeri, Hūli, Kalbhāvi and Saundatti in the Belgaum District. 4) Aihole (?), Hullur and Marol (?) in the Bijapur District. 5) Dōņi, Garag, Hosur, Javur, Manguṇḍi, Morab, Mugad, Navalgund and Shirur in the Dharwar Districit. 6) Rayadrug in the Bellary District. 7) Silāgrāma and Siddhakēdâra in the Mysore State (?). Some of these were very influential centres of the sect.*
may here supplement the above account of the Yapaniya organisations by additional information based on further epigraphic material
1 Journ. of Bomb. University, Arts and Law, 1933, May, pp. 224 ff; Jaina Literature and History (Hindi), p. 41.
2 As some of these centres, e. g., Sedam, Javür, Navalgund, were also noted for the prevalance of the cult of Jvälāmālin!, I am inclined to believe that the Yapaniya teachers, along with others, might have been also responsible for its popularity. Šilagrāma is mentioned in the Kadaba Plates of Prabhutavarsha; Ep. Ind., Vol. IV, p. 345,
