BHADRABAHU AND THE SRAVANABELGOLA KSETRA ROBERT J. ZYDENBOS

on a story found in a work of the 12th century A.D and an inscription dated in the 3rd century B.C., i.e. after Bhadrabahu's arrival in the south. The first argument could be a motivation for Bhadrabahu to move to southern Karnataka, or for us to look for evidence, but nothing more than that. Besides, we need not grant absolute credibility to the romantically large number of 12000 monks who followed Bhadrabihu. Desai draws his second argument from the English translation of the Mahavamsa by Geiger and points to a reference to nigantha-s on p. 75 (chapter X, vss. 97-99) and the supposed time of the events mentioned in that portion of the text as given in the chronological table on p. xxxvi of the introduction. Thus he concludes that during the reign of king Pandukabhaya, 377-307 B.C.. there were Jainas on Ceylon.

In his enthusiasm, however, Desai seems to have overlooked Geiger's very great reservations about the reliability of the early chronology on p. xxi, where he speaks of "an absolute impossibility in respect of the last two kings of that period Pandukabhaya and Mutasiva " . He believes this chronology was faked in order to make the first king, Vijaya, a contemporary of the Buddha. If we accept Jacobi's dale of 350 BC for Bhadrabahu's arrival in the south, and reckon with the false dating of Pandukabhaya as 377, then we may assume the arrival of the nigantha-s on Ceylon to have taken place after Bhadrabahu's arrival in Karnataka and the spread of Jainism further south. As regards the third argument, I must say that it is not really an argument either. There are indeed some indications that the two Tamil works Desai mentions show some influence of Jaina ideas, but this has never been proven conclusively by anyone. Besides this, Desai gives no dates at all for these works, and the latest research has given a date of 100 BC to AD 500 for the Tolkappiyam and AD 450 to 500 for the Tirukkural, i.e., both works were compiled long after Bhadrabahu's arrival in the south." Desai's idea that Jainism was already in the south before Bhadrabahu is interesting, but at present we will have to wait for scholars to come up with other data before we can accept it.

If we cannot accept the view that Jainism existed in the south before Bhadrabahu, then the view that Jainism is of Dravidian origin is still more unwarranted. Nevertheless, there are people who actually want to believe this. M. L. Mehta says that Jainadharma and "Dravidadharma" both see the world as full of sorrow (duhkhapurna). both deny the existence of a creator-god, accept the doctrines of karma and rebirth, accept souls and matter as ultimate realities in a dualistic philosophy, and all these characteristics are non-Vedic : therefore they are Dravidian. and the Dravidians were the people of the ancient Indus Valley civilization, and the inhabitants of Mohenjo Daro were Dravidians and spoke a Dravidian language, so say a number of (anonymous) Vidvans. Mehta gives absolutely no details about his "Dravidadharma" if such a thing exists at all and I have absolutely no idea what he means. If the "Dravidadharma" is supposed to deny the existence of a creator-god, then why did the Shiva and Vaisnava bhakti— movements, which forced back Jainism and completely expelled its sister religion Buddhism from India, begin with the Nayanmar-s  and Alvar-s  in Tamilnadu in the 7th century.  If we would want to know something about the view of life of the ancient Dravidians, then the first thing we ought to do is to examine the oldest Dravidian literature available, the so-called Sangam     literature in Tamil of which the earliest extant poems are dated AD 100-200" : the subject-matter of this literature is love and war, and the values of the people were purely secular. If ever there was such a thing as a '"Dravidadharma", then probably it was some form of theism. It is usually extremely difficult, and especially so in India, to ascribe traits of religious or philosophical thought to this or that ethnic group. From the Sangam  poems we can conclude that for the ancient Tamils the world was not full of sorrow at all, but the contrary seemed much more the case. No one has ever provided evidence that the doctrines of karma  and rebirth are non-Aryan and could not have developed from ideas which we find in the Veda.  So here we have Prof. Mehta writing about "Dravidadharma", which is totally a figment of his imagination, and giving it some of the characteristics of Jainism which are non-Vedic. Then he apparently believes that whatever is non-Vedic is non-Aryan. His next leap into the dark is that whatever is non-Aryan must have a Dravidian origin.

To conclude this survey, we may say that at the present state of scholarly research, the essentials of southern tradition about Bhadrabahu and his Migration to southern Karnataka may be thought of as true, and it is most probable that it was this Srutakevalin who brought Jainism to South India. With this in mind, it easily becomes clear to us why Shravanabelgola ought to be considered the holiest place of Jainism in the south.

 

Acknowledgement : Gommateshvara Commemoration Volume - Mastakabhisheka 1981 - Sharavanabelagola