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MEDIÆVAL JAINISM achievements in the field of religion and philosophy brought the Tamil land into close touch with Karnāțaka.1 Prominent among the Jaina gurus who were responsible for the diffusion of Jainism in the Tamil country were Samantabhadra, Akalanka, Kanaksena, and Gunanandi.
Samantabhadra is a celebrated name in Jainism. Devacandra in his Rājāvaļikathe (A.D. 1838) tells us that Samantabhadra performed penance in the village of Maņuvaka.? This statement of a later writer is insufficient to assert that Samantabhadra was a Kannadiga. No original Kannada work of this great Jaina teacher is available ; but his commentaries in Kannada to Sanskrit and Prakrit works have been discovered.3
The date of this renowned teacher is still unsettled. He may have lived in the earlier part of the second century A.D. This supposition is based on the following considerations. In the first place, it may be observed that in Jaina literary accounts, there is no unanimity at all concerning Samantabhadra's date. In the Viravamśävaļī of the śvetämbaras, Samantabhadra is said to have been the sixteenth Pontiff (from ?), who lived in 889 after Nirvana which corresponds, according to Hiralal, to A.D. 419 as the date of that Jaina guru. But, according to another Jaina tradition,
1. Ramaswami assumes on the strength of the statements made in the Mahāvamso (pp. 49, seq), that Jainism---which, according to him must have been introduced in Ceylon in the fifth century B.C.,-must have left its trace also in the extreme south of India at the same time. Studies ; p. 33. These assumptions do not rest on sure grounds.
2. Kavicarite, I, pp. 2, 4. 3. Ibid, I. p. 4. 4. Hiralal, Cat. of MSS., Intr. p. xi.
