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is no such indication in his biographical details. One chief Asagamarasa is known in the family of Samkaragama, a feudatory of Rāștrakūta Krishna, III (A.D.93-67) and another called Asaga (c.950 A D) of the Kalachūri family of Kalyan is mentioned," But these are all later than Asaga. The term bhūpa occurs only in one colophon, and the author himself has not said anything in this regard. Pt, Pannalal, in his translation presented in this edition, takes prāpya=having acquired, but it is not justified In his Introductin, however, he takes 'having reached'.
It has not been possible so far to identify king Srinātha, the mount Maudgalya and the town Viralā. They have to be searched for in the Coda Vişaya or the Telugu area adjacent to Karnataka. The date of the composition of the Vardhamāna-purāņa is stated as
__ संवत्सरे दशनवोत्तरवर्षयुक्ते; but it is far from a clear statement. Most of the scholars have interpreted it as 910,2 Some have taken it as Śaka era, because it was mostly current in the South, and equated it with A.D.988.3 Years back I suggested that it should be taken as Samvat;4 and later, the late R. Narasimhachar has arrived at the same conclusion,5 The Saka 910=A.D. 988 goes against the known fact that Ponna has used the śāntipurāņa which was written after the Vardhamāna-purāņa as noted by the author himself; and the latest date assigned to Ponna is 973 A, D. Asaga has to be sufficiently earlier than Ponna; and this is possible only if the date 910 is taken as the Vikarama Samvat i. e., equal to A.D.853. Thus Asaga flourished in the middle of the 9th century, and wrote his VP in A.D. 853.6
Asaga mentions three Jaina Teachers: i) Bhāvakirti, in whose presence (pada
1. P, B. Desai : Jainism in South India, Sholapur 1959, p. 368; A History of
Karnataka, Dharwar 1970, p. 216, 2. 914 is a misprint in the Hindi translation in this edition. 3. H. L. Jain : Catalogue of Sanskrit and Prakrit Mss in C, P. and Berar (Nagpur
126); see also his Bhāratiya Samskrtime Jaina Dharmaka Yogadana, Bhopal
1962, p. 170. Pt. J. P. Phadakule in his Introductions. 4. A saga : his works and date, The Karnatake Historical Larterly II, i. pp. 42 ff.
Dharwar 1932, K. M. Sharma : Date of Asaga's Vardhamānacarita, New Indian
Antiquary, Vol. IV Bombay 1941-42 5. Karnātaka Kavicarite, 2nd ed. 1961; also revised 2nd ed. Bangalore 1972. 6. About Asaga, Shri V. B. Lokapur has contributed a number of articles in
Kannada, He has shed a good deal of additional light on this poet. Some of them are : Asaga-kaviya khyāti, Prabuddha-Karņātaka for 1954-55, Mysore. Asagana Vardhmäņa purāņada Kanħada Vy.ākhyāna, Jayanti, July 1955. Asagana Kannada Kumārasambhava, in the Kannada Nudi, Dec. 1952. See also, R. S. Mugali : Kannada Sāhitya-caritre, Ed. 1953, pp. 27, 30, 47, 50,
