Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 2.djvu/490

JAIN influence, and he and all his subjects had become converts to the new faith. The queen and the prime minister, however, were secret adherents to the cult of Siva, whose temple was deserted and closed. They secretly invited Srī Gnāna Sammandha to the capital, in the hope that he might help in extirpating the followers of the obnoxious Jain religion. He accordingly arrived with thousands of followers, and took up his abode in a mutt or monastery on the north side of the Vaigai river. When the Jain priests, who were eight thousand in number, found this out, they set fire to his residence with a view to destroying him. His disciples, however, extinguished the flames. The saint, resenting the complicity of the king in the plot, willed that the fire should turn on him, and burn him in the form of a virulent fever. All the endeavours of the Jain priests to cure him with medicines and incantations failed. The queen and the prime-minister impressed on the royal patient the virtues of the Saiva saint, and procured his admission into the palace. When Sammandha Swāmi offered to cure the king by simply throwing sacred ashes on him, the Jain priests who were present contended that they must still be given a chance. So it was mutually agreed between them that each party should undertake to cure half the body of the patient. The half allotted to Sammandha was at once cured, while the fever raged with redoubled severity in the other half. The king accordingly requested Sammandha to treat the rest of his body, and ordered the Jaina priests to withdraw from his presence. The touch of Sammandha's hand, when rubbing the sacred ashes over him, cured not only the fever, but also the hunched back. The king now looked so graceful that he was thenceforward called Sundara (beautiful) Pāndyan.