286 Lieut.-Colonel Tod on the Religious EslabUshments of Meiear. 



The edicts Nos. VI. and VII,* engraved on pillars of stone in the towns 

 of llasmi and Bakrole, further illustrate the scrupulous observances of the 

 Rands house towards the Jains ; where, in compliance with their peculiar 

 doctrine, the oil-mill and the potter's wheel suspend their revolutions for 

 the four months in the year when insects most abound. Many others of a 

 similar character could be furnished, but these remarks may be concluded 

 with an instance of the influence of the Jains on Rajput society which 

 passed immediately under the author's eye. In the midst of a sacrifice to the 

 god of war, when the victims were rapidly falling by the scymitar, a request 

 preferred by one of them for the life of a goat or a buffalo on the point of 

 immolation, met instant compliance, and the animal now declared amara 

 or immortal, with a garland thrown round his neck, was led ofi' in triumph 

 from the blood-stained spot. 



Nat'hdwara — This is the most celebrated of the fanes of the Hindu 

 Apollo. Its etymology is ' the portal (dxtrira') of the god ' {Nat'k), of the same 

 import as his more ancient shrine of Dwaricat at the world's end {,Juggnt 

 Ki'int), Nat'hdwara is twenty-two miles N.N.E. of Udyapiir, on the right 

 bank of the Bunas. Although the principal resort of the followers of Vishnu, 

 it has nothing very remarkable in its structure or situation. It owes its 

 celebrity entirely to the image of Chishna, which is the same that has been 

 worsliippcd at Mat'htu'a since his deification, between eleven and twelve 

 hundred years before Christ.t As containing the representative of the 

 mildest of the gods of Hind, Nat'hdwara is one of the most frequented 

 places of pilgrimage, though it must want that attraction to the classi- 

 cal Hindu, which tlie caves of Gaya, the sliores of the distant Dwarica, 

 or the pastoral Vrij,§ the place of the nativity of Cuishna, present 



• See Appendix to this article. 



f DH-arica is at the point called Juggut Kunt, of the Saurashtra peninsula. Ca is the 

 mark of the genitive ease. Dviar-ca-nat'h would be the " gate of the god." 



J Fifty-seven descents are given both in their sacred and profane genealogies from Crishna 

 to the princes supposed to have been coteniporary with Vichamaditya. The Yat/u B'/iatIi or 

 Sliaiiia B'halti (the As/iam Bttli of Abul Fuzil), draw their pedigree from Ciusiina or Yadl- 

 nat'h, as do the Jharejas of Kutch. 



§ With Mat'hura as a centre and a radius of eighty miles, describe a circle : all «ithin it is 

 Vrij, which was the seat of whatever was refined in Hinduism, and whose language, the Vrij-basha, 

 was the purest dialect of India. Vrij is tantamount to the land of the Suraseni, derived from 

 Su'rsen', the ancestor of Crishna, whose capital. Surpuri, is about fifty miles south of 



