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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
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NOTES
3. THE SYMBOLS
The Hathi-Gumpha inscription of Kharavela is enclosed between two pairs of symbols. Two symbols are to be seen on its left side, and two on its right. The first symbol on the left stands over against its second line. The fourth symbol on the right stands over against its seventeenth line. These two symbols were apparently intended to mark respectively the beginning and end of the inscription. The second symbol on the left appears below the first, and stands over against the fourth and fifth lines of the inscription. And the third symbol on the right appears at the end of and between the first and second lines of the inscription.
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Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
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For Private And Personal Use Only
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It is not correct to say that the third symbol appears immediately after the name of Kharavela with which the first line terminates.1 Even if this symbol figured just after the name of Kharavela, I do not see how any importance might have been attached to it because of such a position. The symbol, as it now stands, seems to have been set off on the right against the first and second symbols on the left, as an equipoise. In theory, of the four symbols, the first and the fourth were intended to mark the commencement and close of the inscription, and the second and the third to stand, somewhere in the middle, on two sides, enclosing the inscription between them. I believe that this arrangement would not have been departed from, if the right upper corner had not appeared bare as a result of the third symbol having been placed far below the position in which it appears.
What are these four symbols? The first symbol is what the Jains call Vuddha-mangala translated by Dr. Coomarswamy as "Powder-box." The second symbol is the well-known Svastika. The third symbol is what has been labelled as Nandipada or "Bull's foot-mark" in a Buddhist
1. Jayaswal says, "This symbol is inscribed just after the name of Kharavela in the first line." JBORS, 1917, Vol. III, Part IV, p. 428.
