Mysore and Coorg from the Inscriptions c10.4

c10.4

The advice of the priesthood was ever deemed of importance, and they often played a prominent part in political affairs. Megasthenes, in his account of India in the fourth century B.C., says of the Sarmanes (the Jain śramanas) who live in the woods, that they communicate with the kings, who consult them by messengers regarding the causes of things. Aśōka's edicts, which belong to the third century B.C., are evidence of his solicitude for all classes of his subjects, induced in part by Buddhist precept. In the second century A.D. the Jain āchārya Simhanandi made the Ganga kingdom, as it is expressed. In the eleventh century a Jain yati put the Poysalas or Hoysalas in possession of their kingdom. But Brāhmans had the foremost place in more modern times. In the twelfth century the policy of Vishnuvarddhana was radically affected by his conversion from Jajnism to the Vaishnava faith through the reformer Rāmānuja. He is thus said to have given his own country to the Brāhmans and the gods, while he himself ruled over the foreign countries won by his sword. Mādhava or Vidyāranya, an abbot of the monastery at Śringēri established in the eighth century by the reformer Śankara, was instrumental in founding the Vijayanagar empire in the fourteenth century. In the seventeenth century the Mysore king Doḍḍa-Dēva-Rāja, it is said, divided his kingdom into four parts, of which he gave the first to the Brāhmans, the second to the gods, the third to charity, and reserved the fourth for his own use.