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INTRODUCTION.
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of eminence, to compose an eclectic work like Kural without making it purely a code of Jaina dogmas. The Jainas were gaining ground round about Mysore soon after the 3rd century B. C., when Bhadrabāhu migrated to the South ; and within the next two centuries the Jaina faith must have been spreading southwards. If it was to be preached to masses, it must be put in palatable terms and that too in the vernacular of the masses. It has been a policy of Jaina teachers, wherever they go, to adopt the local language for preaching their dognias. So they might have cultivated Tamil to spread and preach the fundamental Jaina doctrines in Dravidian countries. The Jaina authorship consistently explains the strong back-ground of Aryan thought and culture in Kural, because only a couple of centuries before the Jainas had come down freshly from Magadha and surrounding parts in Northern India. The Jaina teachers, the earlier generations of them being well acquainted with Magadhan polity and forms of Government, introduced in their works political notions and theories as current in Magadha, and that is the reason why we find so many points of affinity between Kautilya's Arthas'āstra and Kural. At the beginning of the Christian era the Jaina teachers appear to have been not very confident about their prospective success in the Tamil land, and they might have been afraid that their works might not be well received among the wise of the land; this appears to be the reason why Elācārya or (if he is identical with Kundakunda) Kundakundācārya might have presented Kural to the Madura Sargha through his disciple, Tiruvalluvar, who, from his name, appears to be the son of the soil in Tamil land. In the next two centuries the Jaina faith became gradually established, and the Jainas were the pioneers of the so called Augustan age of Tamil literature; and by the close of the 5th century A. D., as Devasena tells us in his Dars'anasāra (24 etc.), Drāviđà-saogha, perhaps a designation indicating some geographical limitation to the Mulasargha, was established in Madura by Vajranandi.
LATER LIMIT FOR THE DATE SUGGESTED FROM LITERARY AND EPIGRAPHIC EVIDENCES.Turning to the earliest Digambara commentators with a desire to see whether their works help us to settle the date of Kundakunda by quotations etc. from Kundakunda's works, we find that the earliest available commentaries, being incorporated in Dhavalā and Jayadhavalā, do not give any help, because it is wellnigh impossible to distinguish the various strata
ir respective authors. Pajyapāda, so far known the earliest Digambara
Vator on Tattvārthasūtra, quotes, in his Sarvārthasiddhi (II, 10), five } S h ich are found in the same order in Bārasu-Anuvělclchā (Nos. 25-29);
a kunda, though he does not say as to from what source he is quöting. " The context in which they are quoted, the serial order of quotation and the absence of these quotations in Rājavārtika of Akalanka” etc. go to indicate the genuineness of these quotations in Sarvārthasiddhi. Bārasa-Anuvělklaa
1 Sarvärthasıddhi, pp. 90 etc. Ed. Kolhapur, S'aka 1839. 2 Tattvārtha-Rūjavartalom, Ed. Benares, 1916. 3 Sometimes the copyists, not minding the chronological conscquences, incorporate, in the
course of copying, important quotations etc. from later commentaries in earlier ones.
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