________________
JAINA EPIGRAPHS : PART II
243
eclipse occurred in any other month of the year, although there was a lunar eclipse on Pushya paurņimā, Saturday. In this anomalous position, however, a suggestion regarding the probable date is happily forthcoming from an unpublished inscription of my collection at Nimbargi, a village situated at a distance of a few miles from Hunasi-Hadagali. The Nimbargi epigraph belongs to the reign of the same king as of the present record, and records a gift made under identical circumstances. We are told in the Nimbargi inscription that in the 23rd regnal year and Bahudhānya samvatsara, the king was on the bank of the
ver Narmadā and had performed the Talāpurusha ceremony on the occasion of the solar eclipse on the new-moon day of Pushya. It looks imporbable that the king stayed in the camp on the bank of the Narmadā issuing gifts for over seven months from Jyōshtha to Pushya, as we shall have to assume, if the dates of both these records are believed to be correct. For this reason we have to accept one and reject the other. We have seen above how the date of the HuñasiHadagali record is unsatisfactory. So we would leave it out of consideration for the time being.
Now let us concentrate on the date of the Nimbargi record and examine it in some detail. In the cyclic year Bahudhānya no solar eclipse occurred on the Pushya amāvāsyā; but in the two previous years Dhātội and Isvara solar eclipses did occur on the specified tithi. Setting aside the case of the year Dhātři in our present investigation as it would be farther from our point, we shall confine ourselves with the solar eclipse in the year īśvara. The discrepancy of the weekday is still there in this case also as the eclipse occurred on Tuesday and not on Thursday as stated in the Nimbargi record. But this may be ignored.
An important aspect of the transaction deserves to be noticed at this juncture. It was a momentous occasion when the king must have accorded his consent to several religious gifts of varied nature. The benefactions which were thus formally sanctioned on the bank of the Narmadā were subsequently given effect to and recorded in their respective places on stone with proper procedure and due ceremony. These events must necessar entailed some lapse of time in their execution. The interval of time and space and the complications of the administrative procedure appear to have been therefore responsible for the failure in noting correctly the details of the original date of the grants on the part of the local officials. Taking these factors into consideration the real position appears to be like this. The king was on the bank of the Narmada in the month of Pushya in the cyclic year Isvara. On the occasion of the solar eclipse which occurred on the new-moon day of the month, he performed the Tulāpurusha ceremony and sanctioned grants to various religious institutions in his kingdom. These charities were
