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MEDIÆVAL JAINISM arbitrary to assume that Samantabhadra, who, as related above, is always spoken of in inscriptions as having come almost soon after Balākapiñccha, lived in the first quarter of the second century A.D.
From epigraphs as well as literature we know that Samanbhadra visited kañcipura. Thus the record dated A.D. 1129 already referred to above, gives the following graphic description of the career of Samantabhadra :-“At first the drum was beaten by me within the city of Pāțaļiputra, afterwards
Now to the word konda, we have a fort of Konda (Kondadakote), which is unidentifiable, where the founder of the Sāntara line, Jinadatta Rāya, is said to have defeated and put to Alight Kara and Karadūşaņa(E. C. VIII. Nr. 35, p. 134. Nr. 48, 151). A Kunda village in Agumbesīme is mentioned in A.D. 1681 (Ibid., TL. 89, p. 181). Kundagatta was in the Hodinād sime (Ibid. IV. Ch. 77. p. 9).
These examples show beyond doubt that for the origin of the words konda, kunda or konda, we need not look for it in the Tamil land, but only in Karnāšaka.
Then there is the other argument that Kondakunda's name is associated with the Drāvida sangha. Since this sangha, as has been amply proved in this treatise, was established after the original Mula sangha had been divided into four sanghas, and that long after Kondakunda's time, one cannot maintain at all that Kondakunda's having been associated with the Drāvida sangha means that he belonged to the Tamil land.
Further, there is one more argument-Kondakunda's association with a king who is supposed to have belonged to the Pallava dynasty. This, as Prof. Upadhye himself admits (Pravacanasāra, Intr. pp. xxiii-xxiv) is a hollow argument. All these considerations lead us to the conclusion that Kondakunda must have been a Kannadiga, hailing from the village of Konakonala in the neighbourhood of Guntakal.
1. Ramaswami in another connection asserts that the Jainas had penetrated into the extreme south under Kondakunda in the first century A.D. Studies, p. 44.
