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242
JAINISM IN SOUTH INDIA
is Kannada, and the composition prose and verse, with the exception of the following passages in Sanskrit: the benedictory verse in the beginning, verse 14 describing Rakshasa, the donor, and five imprecatory verses at the end.
The inscription opens with an invocation to the commandment of Lord Jina. After a brief statement, in the Puranic fashion, of the cosmographical set-up of the Bharatakshētra (i. e., India), it recounts the genealogy of the later line of the Western Chalukya kings of Kalyāņa, who ruled the country. The narration stops with the king Tribhuvanamalla (Vikramaditya VI) in whose reign the charter was drafted.
Next we are introduced to his senior queen Chandaladevi who was administering several villages allotted to her in the province of Alande After this figures a feudatory chief named Bibbarasa who was holding charge of a portion of the region comprising 120 villages of Gonka. A small unit of a few villages in this tract was under the jurisdiction of a local officer named Chaudhare Rakkasayya. He was Jaina by persuasion and a lay disciple of Balachandra Siddhantadeva. He constructed a temple of Pārsvanatha Tirthakara in his village Haḍangile and made suitable provision for conducting the daily worship and other rituals of the deity, and also of Santinatha in the adjacent shrine, throughout the year.
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An establishment was set up to fulfil the said purpose; and it was to be maintained out of the income derived from the land and other property donated by Rakkasayya. The gift property was handed over to the care of the teacher mentioned above. It was further stipulated that the teacher and the successive disciples of this line were responsible for its proper management.
Royal consent was necessary before the property could be finally alienated to the charitable institution. Accordingly a petition to the effect was filed through Bhivanayya who was the Superintendent of Home Affairs and Commissioner of Records. The king was at that time camping in the sacred place called Kōṭitirtha on the bank of the river Narmada (wrongly mentioned as Godavari in the record), on his way back from his victorious campaign against Dhārā and was making propitiatory gifts after performing the Tulāpurusha ceremony (weighing oneself against gold).
The epigraph mentions the following date: Chalukya-Vikrama Varsha 23, Bahudhanya samvatsara, Jyeshṭha amāvāsyā, solar eclipse. The details given here are irregular and so it is difficult to ascertain the correct date of the record. The date is not verifiable as it contains no week-day. But the mention of solar eclipse offers some clue for verification. In the cyclic year Bahudhanya falling within the regnal period of the king there was no solar eclipse on the new-moon day of the month of Jyeshtha. In fact, no solar
