Mahavira and his Teaching

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

Page 362

ANTIQUITY OF JAINISM IN TAMILNAD
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in pre-historic Tamilnād is the flimsy product of the imagination of Jaina writers to prove the antiquity of Jainism in South India. These scholars argue that it may be a legend or tradition current among the Jainas of Tamilnād. Another legend tells that Sri Krsņa and Arjuna visited Tamilnād and the latter married a Nāga princess of Madurai. The Nāgas, Kols, Drāvidians, Aryans and many other heterogenous people observing different customs, religious faiths, ceremonies, and ways of life were part and parcel of the indigenous and homogeneous people of ancient India. Some legends may not be trustworthy but the celebrated historian on ancient India, Pargiter in his ‘Dynasties of the Kali Age' has stated that many of the legends and traditions current among the people of India contained truths which could be safely adduced to fix up the chronology of kings and also to prove important cvents in the history of ancient India. Archaeological discoveries have proved to the hilt that Pargiter's opinion is most trustworthy in view of the fact that many of these discoveries were made on the basis of legends and also literary evidence from the ancient scriptures. Several illustrations can be cited to claim that legends carried incontrovertible truths relating to pre-historic India!
Besides the Maha Purānam, we have another authentic Tamil classic in Tolakapyam which contains some references to the advent of Jainism to the Tamil country. Tolakapyam is the most ancient classical work in Tamil literature. It is the first and foremost work extant today in Tamil. Tolakapyam is a grammatical work but it also contains some doctrines of Jainism and glimpses of social conditions prevalent in ancient Tamilakam. The age of this literary work has been fixed as between one thousand five hundred years and two thousand years before the birth of Christ.
Nachinarkiniyanar, one of the commentators of Tolakapyam has stated that it was composed before Vyāsa collected and edited the Vedic hymns after the termination of the Mahā Bhārata war. Historians like R. C. Dutt, Jayaswal, Vaidya, Bhandarkar, Tilak and Radhakrishnan and many others have expressed the