dhood till the thirteenth
year of his reign. It begins with an appeal to the Arhat and Siddha, which
corresponds to the beginning of the five-fold form of homage still used
among the Jainas, and mentions the building of temples in honour of the
Arhat as well as an image of the first Jina, which was taken away by a
hostile king. The second and smaller inscription asserts that Kharavela's
wife caused a cave to be prepared for the ascetics of Kalinga, "who
believed on the Arhat." [Footnote: The meaning of these inscriptions,
which were formerly believed to be Buddhist, was first made clear by Dr.
Bhangvanlal's Indraji's careful discussion in the _Actes du Vlieme
Congres Internat. des Orientalistes_ Sect. Ary. pp. 135-159. H; first
recognised the true names of the King Kharavela and his predecessors and
shewed that Kharavela and his wife were patrons of the Jainas. We have to
thank him for the information that the inscription contains a date in the
Maurya Era. I have thoroughly discussed his excellent article in the
_Oesterreichischen Monatsschrift_, Bd. X, S. 231 ff. and have there
given my reasons for differing from him on an important point, namely, the
date of the beginning of the Maurya Era, which, according to his view
begins with the conquest of Kali[.n]ga by A['s]oka about 255 B. C. Even
yet I find it impossible to accept that the expression, "in the hundred
and sixty fifth year of the era of the Maurya Kings", can mean anything
else than that 164 years have passed between the thirteenth year of the
rule of Kharavela and the anointing of the first Maurya King Chandrugupta.
Unfortunately it is impossible to fix the year of the latter occurrence,
or to say more than that it took place between the years 322 and 312 B.C.
The date given in Kharavela's inscription cannot therefore be more closely
fixed than that it lies between 156 and 147 B.C. I now add to my former
remarks--that appeals to the Arhat and Siddha appear also in Jaina
inscriptions from Mathura and may be taken as a certain mark of the sect.
Thus it is worthy of note that even in Hiuen Tsiang's time, (Beal,
_Si-yu-ki_, Vol. II, p. 205) Kalinga was one of the chief seats of
the Jainas.]

From a somewhat later period, as the characters show, from the first
century B.C. comes a dedicatory inscription which has been found far to
the west of the original home of the Jainas, in Mathura on the Jamna. It
tells of the erection of a small temple in honour of the Arhat