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MEDIÆVAL JAINISM When the Malanād Mahaprabhu Gopaņņa died in A.D. 1408, as noted by us in a previous page, Kuppaţūr was already turned into a fine place—the pride of the Jainas. The inscription dated A.D. 1408 which informs us this, praises it in high terms. It relates that shining in beauty beyond all countries was the entire Karnāțaka province, and in that Karnāțaka country was the famous Guttinād which contained Eighteen Kampaņas, in which the most famous nād was Nāgarakhanda to which Kuppațūr was an ornament, with its caityālayas, lotus ponds, pleasure gardens, and fields of gandhaśāli rice. Indeed, the Jainas had turned it into a charming city, for the stone inscription tells us that it was to the Bhavyas that it owed its grandeur :-Bhavya-jana-dharmāvāsadim santatam sale caityalayadinde pū-goļagaļind-udyānadim gandha-śāli-lasat-kşetra nikayadinde ramaniyam bettu-vibhrājikum pū-late pü-gida pū-mara sālind allalli-kēri-kērigalol-caityālayada munde tumbiya jālam madav ēre-merevav ā-parimaladolu."
This inscription enables us to assert with certainty that the Jainas, who had already won renown as king-makers, were also well known as builders of towns. In fact, much of the commercial, and not a little of the æsthetic, greatness of the cities of the Vijayanagara Empire, especially those in Karnāțaka, was due to the industrious and artistic attempts of these people who, we may well imagine from the manner in which in our own days they have amply demonstrated in the matter of adding to the material progress of towns and corporations, must have expended a substantial part of their immense wealth, in the name of the Jina dharma, to satisfy the aesthetic needs of the mediaeval cities. The few notices of other mediaeval cities gathered from stone
1. E. C. VIII. Sb. 261, text p. 108.
