Religion and Culture of the Jains

Author(s): Jyoti Prasad Jain
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

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RELIGION & CULTURE OF THE JAINS
ruling dynasties of the regions south of the Vindhyas, and particularly in the Kannada speaking areas (roughly represented by the present Mysore State) this creed of the Arhatas considerably flourished. . Many royal families, especially the Gangas of Mysore and the Kadambas and Western Cālukyas of central and western Deccan, their ministers and feudal chiefs and the bankers, traders and industrialists exhibited a decided leaning towards this religion and supported it in different ways. Building temples, feeding groups of monks, worship of the images of the Tīthankaras and celebration of Jaina festivals constituted the modes of expressing religious zeal which was shared alike by the royalty and the subjects.
Further south, the Buddhist chronicles of Ceylon speak of the existence of Jainism in that country as early as circa 400 B.C., while inscriptions in the Brāhmi script of the Maurya period, discovered in some caves in the Tamil country, do the same with respect to that region. Much of the early Tamil literature is of Jaina authorship, which is indicative of the flourishing state of this religion in south India in the early centuries of Christian era.
Even an order of Jaina ascetics came to be designated the Dravida sangha, the beginnings of which are traced to the Jaina saint Samantabhadra of the 2nd century A.D. But it was also in the Tamil lands that in the 6th-7th century Jainism had to suffer from violent persecutions at the hands of the Saiva saints Appāra and Sambandar, who had succeeded in converting from Jainism the Pallava king of Kāñcī and the Pāndya king of Madură. This was the first serious setback that Jainism received in the far south.
In the north, during the five centuries or so after the downfall of the Guptas early in the 6th century A.D., a number of dynasties ruled in succession from the imperial city of Kannauj. Some of the later Gupta kings and even a barbarous Hūņa