The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c35.s1.13

c35.s1.13

The aboriginal ‘devil worship’, exposed to the persistent attacks of the three northern religions—Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism—was gradually forced into the background, and constrained to veil itself behind the names and forms of the more respectable faiths. The introduction of Jainism into the South was effected, according to Jain tradition, by a body of emigrants who were driven out of the North from their homes by the pressure of a twelve years’ famine, in the reign of Chandragupta Maurya. The event is assigned by some authorities to 309 B. C. The strangers settled at Sravana Belgola in Mysore, where their sainted leader, Bhadrabāhu, starved himself to death in the approved Jain manner. The present head of the ancient Jain settlement at Sravana Belgola claims to be the successor of Bhadrabāhu and is recognized as the pontiff of all the Jains of Southern India. The story is associated, as we have seen (*ante*, p. 154), with statements concerning the last days of Chandragupta Maurya which are discredited by some and accepted by other critics. Whatever may be the truth concerning the alleged abdication and suicide of the Maurya emperor, no sufficient reason seems to exist for rejecting the tradition of the Jain immigration, which brought the religion of Mahāvira to the South half a century before Buddhist missionaries appeared. Samprati, a grandson of Asoka, is said to have been converted by Suhastin, and to have sent many missionaries to preach Jainism in the Peninsula, where his creed undoubtedly secured such wide acceptance that Mr. Rice is justified in affirming that during the first millennium of the Christian era Jainism may be regarded as having been the predominant religion of Mysore. Nor was it confined to Mysore; it spread everywhere more or less.¹ In the Pāndya country the decline of Jainism began in the seventh century, but the religion continued to flourish in Mysore and the Deccan for ages after that time.