Ravikirti Dedicates the Meguti Jain Temple at Aihole

A hundred and eighty one years after Devarddhi-gani redacted the Svetambara canon at Valabhi in 453, and more than two centuries before the Jain scholar Jinasena composed the Adipurana at Amoghavarsha's Rashtrakuta court in 850, both already recorded here, Jain patronage found monumental expression in the Deccan. In 634, Ravikirti, a Jain scholar, poet and minister at the court of the Chalukya emperor Pulakeshin II, completed and dedicated a temple to the Jinendra atop the hill at Aihole in present day Karnataka, known today as the Meguti temple, endowing it with grants of six villages for its upkeep. On the temple's eastern wall Ravikirti inscribed the Aihole Prashasti, a nineteen line Sanskrit eulogy that is the only precisely dated monument at Aihole and today the earliest datable literary reference to the celebrated Sanskrit poets Kalidasa and Bharavi, alongside its own account of Pulakeshin II's reign, including his turning back an invasion by the northern emperor Harsha. One of the earliest surviving structural Jain temples in Karnataka, the Meguti temple stands as a well documented instance of royal Jain patronage under Chalukya rule in the long span between the Digambara and Svetambara sects each settling their own scripture in the mid first millennium and the flourishing of Jain literary and artistic patronage under the Rashtrakutas two centuries later.