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Ārya Bhadrabahu
some medieval Śvetāmbara abbatial (caityavāsī) monk practicing sorcery and plausibly belonged to the late ninth or early tenth century A.D. as the of the hymn suggest.
7) It is likely that the emperor Candragupta, in the last year of his regnal period, may have been admitted by Bhadrabahu to the Order of Mendicants. The combined information obtained from the Tiloyapaṇnati (c. mid 6th cent.) and several inscriptions from Śravanabelagola dating from circa the mid seventh century onwards, provide such an indication. The 12th century Śvetāmbara writer Hemacandra, on the basis of some source before him, records that Candragupta attained Samādhimaraṇa 107, death by the rite of suspension of aliment which, too, would hint towards a possibility that he had embraced Nirgranthism. There is thus some degree of probability on this score even when the concerned sources are not sufficiently ancient. Some hazy but a genuine memory of the past event seems to have been preserved in that tradition 108. Bhadrabahu doubtless was contemporary of Candragupta but not of Samprati who, in point of fact, was the son of Candragupta's great grand son Kunāla*. Both Bhrājisņu, the author of the Karṇāṭa-ṭīkā on the Ārādhanā and Hemacandra, the author of the Parisistaparva, are confused on this point. Samprati's association with Ujjayanī as his capital (by virtue of his becoming the ruler of the western half of Aśoka's empire) does seem a historical reality or at least a plausibility.
139
8) As for Bhadrabāhu's visit to Śravanabelagola alongwith his mendicant disciple Candragupta and the passing away of both of them there, it is not so recorded in the earliest inscription from Śravanabelgola (c. A.D. 600). The inscription does mention Bhadrabahu in connection with the prediction he made in Ujjayani of the 12 years' drought, but does not mention Bhadrabahu and Candragupta or bring them to Śravanabelagola, although this eventuality of historic importance and of considerable significance could hardly have been missed by the author of the draft of the inscription. Instead, it mentions Prabhācandra to have died there 109. And no direct or indirect allusion to the effect of Bhadrabahu's and
Candragupta's association with Śravanabelagola is available in Northern Indian Jaina sources. Somewhere in Karnataka, this belief was taking shape apparently in the late sixth century and was firmly established by mid seventh The dynastic order is Candragupta, Bindusara, Aśoka, Kuṇāla, and Samprati.
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