Studies in South Indian Jainism

Author(s): M S Ramaswami Ayyangar, B Seshagiri Rao
Publisher: M S Ramaswami Ayyangar

Page 67

A BLANK IN SOUTH INDIAN HISTORY 51 the five senses, taste, smell, touch, hear and see. An atom may become a body or assume other forms. To stop the origin of good and evil deeds, and to enjoy the effect of past deeds, and to cut off all bonds is release (salvation).1" The third and fourth centuries of the Chris- 'The third
and fourth tian era seem to be a perfect blank in the history centuries of the Jains in the Tamil kingdom. What blank. little information we have been able to gather about the Jains in the Sangam period is from non-Brahminical sources, the Brahmin as well as the other Hindu poets of the Sangam having ignored their very existence. Just as the literature of the north refused to take cognizance of the great raid of Alexander, so the Brahminical literature of the south had not cared to shed any light on the history and activities of the Jains. But we can, more or less, follow the probable course of the development of Jainism in the light of their later history, particularly of the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. Second century A.D. is a great age in Jain history ; not merely Kunda Kunda but other Jain scholars as well evinced the greatest activity during this period in spreading their gospel. The necessary impulse and resource for an undertaking of such magnitude must have come from Sravana Belgola. The Gangas who ruled the Gangavādi for nearly nine centuries, second to eleventh century A.D., had been great patrons of Jainism and must have aided the spread of the faith in the
1 The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago, pp. 215-16.