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36 ANDHRA KARNATA JAINISM. a gift of land to a Jaina temple by Ramarajaiya, elder brother of Aliya-Lingarajaiya and grandson of Ramaraja Odeya, for the merit of bis father Mallaraja Odeyd. The important fact to be noticed is that these Jaina grants are allowed to be recorded in non-Jaina shrines.
Similarly, in the Karnāta dēsa, in the S. Kanara district, at Kötēsvara, in the local pagoda of Kötēsvara there is a record dated in S. 1468, Prabhava, in the reign of Sadāsivarāya, stating that Echappa Udayar gave 50. gadyanams of land to that deity. Echappa was the same as the Jaina chief of Garisappa who married a daughter of the last Karkal“king. If Kōtēsvara is & Jaina deity, there is nothing very remarkable in this grant. But it solves a very interesting problem regarding the foundation of Chicacole (Srikakulam) in the Ganjam District with its teniple of Kötēsvara, viz., its early Jaina associations. Otherwise, a grant hy a Jaina to a Saiva shrine in the Karnāta country, about the time when Vīra-Saiva persecution of Jainism was rampant in the Andhra dēsa throws a flood of light on the great religious toleration of the Karnātas, to which Jainism owed its continued life and prosperity on the West Coast of the South Indian Presidency.
This circumstance accounts for the fact that among the discovered epigraphs relating to Jainism, the more numerous ones occur in the Andhra-Karnāta and Karnāta mandalas. Still, it must be observed that further research is
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