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118
TULSI-PRAJNA
“This temple of the Arbats and cave for the shop of Kalinga has been made by the chief queen of the illustrious ada, the overlord af Kalinga, who was the daughter of king aan.
Originally confined to a small area, Jainism soon started on a career of conquest and there is reason to believe that Agrate himself moved to Kalinga to preach his gospel. In the statyst inscription cited above occurs an expression mentioning the setting in motion of the wheel of conquest of the First Hills and this seems to contain an allusion to the visit of the great teacher to the Kalinga country.
The migration of saferent wag along with his disciple, the Maurya em peror Chandragupta, to the southern part of Mysore in the third century B.C. constitutes an important landmark in the history of Jainism in South India. This episode is narrated in an inscription at श्रवण बेलगोल' as follows:
"Success : Be it well, Victory has been achieved by the venerable an, the establisher of the glorious holy faith and the embodiment of the nectar of happiness resulting from the perfection attained.” Now indeed, after the sun gerate has completely set, IQTE-Fatalt who came in regular descent from the venerable supreme Rishi Taar, who was acquainted with the true nature of the eightfold great omens and was a seer of the past, the present and the future, having learnt from an omen and foretold in Ujjayini a calamity lasting for a period of twelve years, the entire Sangha set out from the North to the South and reached by degrees a country containing many hundreds of villages and filled with happy people, wealth, gold, grain and heards of cows, buffaloes, goats and sheep".
Jainism, however, seems to have journeyed to the Tamil country through Kalinga and 1787, prior to its advent into far. This is indicated by epigraphic sources. In the southern parts of the Tamil country, particularly in the areas of the Pudukkottai, agar and Tinnevelly districts, are found a large number of ancient relics in the form of beds popularly attributed to the Five qisars. They are carved in hills and caverns, some of them bearing inscriptions in peculiar atat characters of about the third or second century B.C. As some of these beds are associated with Jaina symbols, it is possible to conclude that they were the creations of Jaipa monks who had settled in those areas for the propagation of their faith before the third century B.C.
Epigraphy has largely contributed to the historical study of the
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