ABSTRACT
Palm-leaf manuscript copies of this long work, including an important eighth-century commentary by V⁄rasena, along with another old text, the ‘Treatise on the Passions’ (Kasåyapåhu∂a), supposedly composed not long after the ‘Scripture of Six Parts’ and also accompanied by a commentary, were at some time deposited in the Digambara holy place of M¨∂bidr⁄, a small town in the south-west of Karnataka, in the region of Tulu Nadu, where a temple was built to house them. Although the traditional source of M¨∂bidr⁄’s fame originally lay in the miraculous discovery there of an image of the fordmaker Pår¬va, its rise to prominence as a Digambara pilgrimage place and the lavish building projects undertaken there by local rulers from the thirteenth century on were in part the result of possession of these manuscripts.
