The Rashtrakutas and their Times c20.14

c20.14

Wide and sympathetic toleration was the general characteristic of our age. There were a few persecutions here and there; in the *S'ankaradigvijaya*, a book of essentially lengendary character, *S'as'ānka* is alleged to have ordered a general murder of Buddhists including women and children; in Sindh, Chacha's brother Chander is said to have compelled¹⁰ his subjects to accept his faith under the threat of sword; Udayendiram plates of Nandivarman which record the grant of a village to Brahmanas after the 'destruction of the irreligious,'¹¹ may suggest a kind of persecution of heterodox sects in Tamil country; the Jains for some time suffered terribly from the S'aiva fanaticism of some of the Pandya rulers. But these cases were rather exceptional and did not represent the spirit of the age. From the 5th century A.D., the Purāṇas were advocating the view that all the different deities were the manifestations of the same divine principle, and that their followers should not quarrel. This view had begun to be universally accepted. Kṛṣṇavarmā, a king of the early Kadamba dynasty, who describes himself as the performer of the As'vamedha sacrifice, is known to.