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THE ORIENT
obtained from Kankali Tila, Mathura. The inscription on the pedestal suggests that the image date from the Kushana period and is possibly not later than the second century A.D. But a relief panel from the same site, now in the State Museum Lucknow, showing a scene identified as that of the Dance of Nilanjana and renunciation of Risabhanatha, is clearly assignable to the Sunga period, second rentury B.C.
The caves at Udayagiri and Khandagiri, in Orissa, are supposed to belong to the Jaina faith. Kharavela, are inscription is found in the Hathi Gumpha cave (Fig. 6), and the inscriptions of his queen and prince, show that the donors followed Jainism. Kharavela's inscription has been assigned to the second or first century B.C. by various scholars. A cave inscription from Pabhosa, near Kausambi, Allahabad district, refers to King Bahasatimitra and the excavation of the cave for Kasyapiya Arhats. Since Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara, belonged to the Kasyapagotra, the cave can be safely regarded as excavated for use by Jaina monks, in second century B.C. It is interesting to note that inside the cave, on the southern side, is a stone bed with pillow for the monks to rest.
This practice of carving stone bed with pillow for Jaina monks living in rock-cut caves and natural caverns is also discovered from various sites in Tamil Nadu. Scattered all over the Tamil country such natural caverns with stone beds and pillows, and inscribed in early Brahmi characters and Tamil language, are found at several spots on the Eastern Ghats, particularly in the region around Madurai. The dates of these inscriptions vary from c. second century B.C. to c. third century A.D., the earliest inscription being perhaps the one from Mangulam.
It is presumed that the Jainas reached this area from the Karnataka region, through the hills of the Kongụ country (Coimbatore area), the region west of Tiruchirappalli, further south to Pudukottai and then to the hills of Madurai. However, this belief rests on the general, but relatively late, accounts of Chandragupta Maurya and Acharya Bhadrabahu, migrating to Sravana Belgola from the north in the early third century B.C. The earliest reliable archaeological source for this belief is an inscription at Sravana Belgola, which, as this writer has shown elsewhere, clearly shows that it was not the Srutakevali Bhadrabahu-I, but another later Bhadrabahu, and the inscription itself gives names of some of the Jaina acharyas who flourished between the two Bhadrabahus. So it is not impossible that this earlier evidence of Jaina monks in Tamil Nadu was due, perhaps, to infiltration from Pratisthanapur, either during the region of Samprati the grandson of Ashoka (as the Brihatkalpa-bhasya suggests) or during the rule of some early Satavahana rulers who had Jaina leanings. There is no archaeological evidence of Jainism in Karnataka, so far discovered,
