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MEDIEVAL JAINISM
enquiry conducted in the reign of the Emperor Deva Raya II, shows that the Vijayanagara Government bestowed the greatest care on minute social distinctions affecting the public life of its citizens; and that it entrusted such work to the most highly qualified and learned men in its service.
In the middle of the same century, we have Jinadevaņņa, who wrote Śreņikacarite in A.D. 1444, and Vijayanna, who wrote Dvadasanuprekşe. The latter work was written at the command of the Honnabandi Deva Rāja, the king of the Belvulanaḍ in Kuntala. Vijayanna seems to have written his work in the Santinatha basadi of Vemmanabhavi in the same nāḍu.1
Their contemporary was Vidyānanda, who is not to be confounded with the celebrated orator we have described above. Vidyānanda was the author of a Kannada commentary on (his own) Sanskrit work called Prayascitta. He was the son (? disciple) of Brahmasuri alias Bommarasa Upadhyāya, and probably a native of Kanakāgiri in Maleyur. He mentions Vijayakīrti as the guru who taught him from his boyhood.2
where Dr. Ramanayya wrongly identifies the Vijayanagara ruler mentioned in Mallinatha's work with king Deva Raya I. How he came to make the author of Vaisyavamsasudhārņava Mallinatha II cannot be understood. Neither how Dr. Ramanayya failed to refer to Dr. Shama Sastry's citation of Mallinatha and the latter's work in his Mysore Archæological Report. We may observe here that the name Suri stamps Mallinātha as a Jaina, although his magnificent commentaries make him a most extraordinary Jaina with an uncommonly non-sectarian outlook. Evidently to Mallinātha Sūri Knowledge was the first concern, and Religion, the next.
1. Kavicarite, II, pp. 86-89. 2. Ibid, II, p. 96.
