The Colas c10.13

c10.13

The early chapters of the *Mahāvaṁsa* contain testimony, sufficiently authentic and precise, to the early intercourse between the Cōḷa country and the island of Ceylon; and generally, the early literature of Pali Buddhism makes very valuable, though scanty, allusions to the land of the Cōḷas and Kāvērippaṭṭinam, its most celebrated emporium. Some of these references must be as old as the *Periplus*, if not earlier. *The Questions of King Milinda*, a Buddhist work of the beginning of the Christian era, mentions Kolapattana among the best-known sea-port towns of the time, and Kolapattana must be, says Rhys Davids, some place on the Coromandel coast.³⁰ Most probably this is a reference to Kāvērippaṭṭinam, the Pattana *par excellence* on the Coromandel coast, which figures elsewhere in Pali Buddhist literature as well. M. Sylvain Lévi has pointed out that Puhār, the great centre of traffic between Southern India and the islands of the Archipelago, was the original abode of the somewhat obscure sea-goddess Maṇimekhalā—'girdle of gems'—after whom Mādhavi's celebrated daughter and the poem of Śāttan narrating the story of her spiritual life came to be called.³¹ In the *Jātaka* story, Akitti, in order to escape the attentions of his admirers, left the neighbourhood of Benares for the Tamil country where he spent some time in a garden near Kāvēripaṭṭana.