History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c18.s1.53

c18.s1.53

The tax was levied not on Ājīvika mendicants, but on their patrons, the Ājīvika laymen. Chakravarti’s second objection is more serious. The tax is usually listed among many trade taxes of various kinds. The usual form of the word as it occurs in the inscriptions is *Ācuva*, a possible Dravidian corruption of *Ājīva* or *Ājīvika*, but a word which might be based, as Chakravarti suggests, upon a Tamil word *ācu*. One of the Poygai inscriptions, however, gives a form much closer to the correct Sanskrit—*Ācivi(ka)*,¹ and any doubts should finally be set at rest by the earliest of our inscriptions, that of Simhavarman Pallava.² This is in Sanskrit, and the *Ājīvika-kara* is there mentioned in its correct Sanskrit form.