Temples of Kumbhariya

Author(s): M A Dhaky, U S Moorty
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 44

The Temples in Kumbhariya
legendary lives), the second dwelt upon the lives of the cakravartīs (legendary universal emperors) and related imperial personages, and the third plausibly dealt with the structure and geographic/cosmographic components and divisions of the 'loka' (universe, cosmos) as conceived/visualized in the Nirgrantha-darśana. In addition, he also composed 'samgrahanīs' or the topical versified collections of Prakrit verses. His disciple Arya Samudra had visited Suvarnabhūmi, a part either of Myanmar (Brahmadeśa, Burma), or southern Thailand (Siama), or southern Malaysia, or Sumātrā in Indonesia.
In the meantime, Arya Syāma's contemporary Arya Vajra's disciple Arya Vajrasena and some time after him the friars of the Nāgendra-śākhā which emanated from Vajrasena's disciple Arya Nāgila/Nāgendra, had settled in Lāta, today's mid and southern Gujarat, very plausibly in circa mid first century A.D. According to an anecdote noticed in the Prabhāvakacarita (A.D. 1277), to one notable Nirgrantha poet-friar, Vajrabhūti, had met the consort of Nabhovāhana (Kșatrapa ruler Nahāpāņa) some time in the last quarter of the first century A.D.
The next and the more tangible evidence, now from the archaeological side, is the fragmentary Nirgranthist inscription of the time of the Ksatrapa ruler Rudrasena I (or Dāmjad Śrī) and dateable to c. A.D. 198-199, from Girinagara (present day Junāgadh). The inscription was discovered from one of the rock-cut caves (apsidal and hence caitya-cave) of the so-called Bāvā Pyārā group which apparently was an unpretentious monastic establishment of the Nirgrantha monks as indicated by the ‘mangalas', auspicious symbols, depicted above the doors of a couple of caves there.
Seemingly, the famous Sakunikāvihāra in Bhrgukaccha had been founded during the early centuries of Christian or Common Era. And if the Ratha-vasati at Ankotaka (Akoţā, near Vadodarā/Baroda) mentioned in one of the medieval inscriptions there was named after Arya Ratha (c. 1st-2nd cent. A.D.), that would represent one more early Nirgrantha foundation in Lāta territory. One Arya Khapata, who plausibly lived in the Lāța region in late Ksatrapa or early Gupta period, is addressed as 'vidyābali', proficient in sorcery, in the post-Gupta Jaina literature, especially in early āgamic commentaries of different categories/descriptions. He is accredited to have defeated the Buddhists and retrieved the Sakunikāvihāra of Jina Munisuvrata in Bhrgukaccha from their clutches. It seems that the Svetāmbara sect apparently took its clearer shape during these centuries, particularly those that covered late Kşatrapa and early Gupta epochs.