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The Paramara Emperor Bhoja and Dhana pāla : Mutual Relationship 101 the Brāhmanico-Puranic faith, criticized by Dhanapala in the incidents recounted above, have also been made the target of their satirical salvoes by veteran Jaina authors like Haribhadrasuri in his Dhuttakkhāna (i, e. Dhārtakhyāna), by Amitagati in his Dharmaparikṣā, and by Soma deva in his rašastilaka-campū, one has to believe that at least Prabhacandra, though not Merutunga, cannot possibly be charged with baving fabricated the incidents with the sole intention of using Dhanapala and his prestige in favour of the propagation of the Jajna faith. In his thesis on Māgha Dr. Manmohanlal Sharma has up-held the reliability of some of the basic data supplied by the Prabandbas. 30
Historical data reveals that Bhoja was a impirial monarch whose writ ran over almost the whole of North India, and who was an unrivalled patron of men of letters in his days. Naturally he must have been very proud, almost to the extent of being jealous of impatient, of his Saivite faith; of his power, patronage and unsurpassable scholarship of his assembly. Prabhācandra has noticed a few instances of Bhoja's anxiety to guard the honour of his assembly of scholars, even at the cost of the life of the adversary. Thus it is said that he almost decided to murder Dhanapala whose caustic digs at the weak points of certain Hindu religious beliefs enraged him.31 Again, he is said to have staked one lac coins for each of the five hundred scholars of his assembly to meet the challenge of Vadim vetāla sāntisüri, who is said to have returned alive on the strength of Dhanapala's precautionary measures.32 A similar, though more serious, incident has been recorded by Prabhacandra with reference to Sūrācārya, a Jaina monk, who, due to his haughty scholarship, severely criticised the introductory verse of Bhoja's Sarasvati,kanthabharaṇa, a work on Sanskrit Grammar, and obliquely abused the king to have committed a great poetic crime in composing a verse suggestive of conjugal relations with the wife of one's nephew.38 It was, again, due to Dhana pala's active assistance that Sūrācārya could be safely smuggled out of the strong police ring clamped around the Jaina monastery and transported beyond the pale of Malava territory, 34 In his ambitious zeal to reconcile all the systems of Indian pbilosopby, Bhoja is recorded to have had recource to dictatorial method when he rounded up various scholars of different faiths and confined them in a dungeon from which they were to be set free only if they arrive at a unanimous decision 135 And the desired unanimity did come off, not with regard to the systems, but about how to save one's life !! And the credit for setting the king on the right track by convincing him of the impossibility of such a unanimity and abondoning the crude method is said to have gone to the above-mentioned Sūrācārya, If we take these traditional anec. dotes at their face value, we have no ground to disbelieve the incident which narrates how at the conclusion of the public recital of the Tilakamanjari.
