Page:The Pālas of Bengal.djvu/65

Rh had no meaning to other persons. The author had great facilities for the collection of information as his father was Rāmapāla's Sāndhivigrahika. The comparison of Rāmapāla with Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa, seems to have been habitual with the courtiers of the 11th century A.D. A verse of the Kamauli grant of Vaidyadeva mentions the conquest of Mithilā and a king named Bhīma, and at the same time compares Rāmapāla with Rāma:—

According to Lama Tārānātha, Yakṣapāla was a colleague of Rāmapāla. It is stated definitely that this prince was the son of Rāmapāla who was the son of Hastipāla and was the last prince of the Pāla family. An inscription of a king (Narendra) named Yakṣapāla was found at Gayā by Sir Alexander Cunningham and published by the late Dr. Kielhorn in 1887. But the king mentioned in this record cannot be the same person as that mentioned by Lama Tārānātha as Rāmapāla's son, as the genealogy of this Yakṣapāla is given in the inscription. He is the son of Viśvāditya, who built the temple of Gadādhara, of Akṣayavaṭa and of Prapitāmaheśvara, the grandson of Śūdraka. The family was a very important one during the reigns of Nayapāla, Vigrahapāla and his sons. The following inscriptions of the family have been discovered at Gaya:—

(1) Inscription on the gate of the modern Kṛṣṇa-Dvārika temple, recording the erection of a temple of Viṣṇu by a low class Brāhmaṇa named Viśvāditya in the 15th year of Nayapāladeva.

(2) Inscription inside the small temple dedicated to Narasiṁha in the courtyard of the Viṣṇupāda temple recording the erection of a temple to Gadādhara and several other minor shrines—by one Viśvarūpa of the same lineage as Viśvāditya in No. 1.

(3) Inscription broken into two parts in the wall of small shrine under the Akṣayavaṭa at Gayā, recording the erection of two temples of Śiva—Vateśa and Prapitāmaheśvara—by the same Viśvāditya.

(4) Inscription under the image of Gadādhara at Gayā—begins with an invocation to the Sun-god and mentioning Paritoṣa, the grandfather of Viśvāditya.

(5) The Sitalā temple inscription of Yakṣapāla recording the erection of a temple dedicated to various deities and digging a tank named Uttaramānasa.

The last inscription was published in 1887 and at that time the late Dr. Kielhorn was of opinion that "the characters of the inscription are Devanāgarī, or to be more particular, a kind of Devanāgarī, which appears to have been current in the 12th century A.D." But if the characters of this inscription are compared with those of the Narasiṁha temple inscription of Nayapāladeva, on the one hand, and the