Mahavira and his Teaching

Author(s): C C Shah, Rishabhdas Ranka, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Bhagwan Mahavir 2500th Nirvan Mahotsava Samiti

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THE ASCENDENCT & ECLIPSE OF BHAGAVAN MAHĀVĪRA'S CULT 319
of the former government of Travancore, have declared that the remnants of a large colony of Jainas were found in the vicinity of this temple. [See Appendix C.)
54. The innermost sanctum sanctorum of the above 'Nāgarāja' Temple, (which is now an all-stone edifice), is even now a low thatched sun-shade, less than five feet in height, covered over with dry cocoanut leaves spread on half-a-dozen bamboo poles. It houses about a dozen stone Naga images with and without human figures carved in them. The sand of this small hut was, and is even now, distributed as 'prasādam' to the devotees, along with a leaf of the 'Nāgatāli' creeper, which had once been bowering over the thatched shed. Since hundreds of millions of devotees had been receiving this sand every day for the last twenty centuries, the wet surface had been going down in level year after year and it is always refilled with river-sand periodically. It needs, therefore, no great imagination to conclude that the sanctum sanctoram had been the ‘nishidhi' (Samādhi) of a most revered devotee of Pārsvanātha.
VI. In the Land of the Chera:
55. In a paper entitled “New Light on Kunavayir-Kottam and the date of Śrlappadhikāram', contributed to the Journal of Indian History, Trivandrum. [Vol. XLVII, Part III, December, 1970], by M. G. S. Nārāyaṇan, (Calicut University) the identification of the monastery of 'Kuņavāyir-Kottam' with the ancient "Trikkaņāmatilakam', near modern Cranganore (the Musiris of Ptolemy) and its Jaina religious persuasion, have been confirmed. The above conclusion have been based on five independent inscriptional and archaeological evidences, studied In-Situ by Mr. Nārāyaşan, aided by a few other experts of the Archaeological Survey of India. (See Appendices D, E, F.) His studies have yielded, further, the following unexpected results also: (1) An inscription at Kinalūr, near Calicut, dated A.D. 1083, states that it was inscribed in the 189th year of the establishment of a town called ‘Kuņavāy-Nagaram'. (2) Another inscription from Putāditālakkāvu,