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MEDIAVAL JAINISM
and a Jaina. In the above record this great general is merely called “a pūrņa-kumbha for the coronation of the Hoysala Mahārāja Vişnuvardhana." But in another stone inscription dated A.D. 1115 and found also in the same Cāmuṇqarāya basadi, Ganga Rāja is called “raiser up of the kingdom of Vişnuvardhana Poysala Mahārāja."1 These two statements are very suggestive. It must be confessed that the initial year of king Vişnuvardhana's rule is not known. The earliest year of his reign is A.D. 1111.2 Since in A.D. 1115 Ganga Rāja is explicitly stated to have raised aloft the kingdom of that ruler ; and since we know that king Vişnuvardhana had a younger brother named Udayāditya, who is known to have died in A.D. 1123,3 it is not improbable that there may have been a contest between Vişnuvardhana and Udayāditya on the death of their elder brother king Ballāļa I in about A.D. 1106, or another attack on the Hoysala throne by its many enemies like the Sāntaras or the Pāņdyas. Whatever that may be, the coronation of king Vişņu seems to have taken place after A.D. 1115 ; and what is more important, it was the Jaina general Ganga Rāja who was the chief supporter of that monarch on that important occasion.
King Vişnuvardhana had good reasons to be proud of his great Jaina general. Stone inscriptions at śravana Belgola and in the Narasimha temple at Belúr give us many details about Ganga Rāja's achievements, and reveal to us what an important part he played in the Hoysala administration. For instance in A.D. 1118 the following is said of him : “As the thunderbolt to the thunderbolt-bearer Indra, as the plough to the plough-bearer Balarāma, as the discus to the discus
1. E. C. II, 127, p. 55. 2. Rice, My. & Coorg, p. 99. 3. Ibid., p. 97
