Acharya Virasena was a Digambara monk of the Panchastupa lineage and a disciple of Acharya Aryanandi. He lived in the Deccan in the days of the Rashtrakuta kings and worked at Vatagrama. By then the ancient Shatkhandagama had become very hard to understand. Virasena wrote an enormous commentary on it, in a mix of Prakrit and Sanskrit, about 72,000 verses in length, called Dhavala, the brilliant white. Many scholars date its completion to 816 CE.
He then began the Jayadhavala, a commentary on Gunadhara's Kashayapahuda, but passed away after writing about 20,000 verses of it. His disciple Jinasena, author of the Adipurana, completed it in 837 CE. Virasena's writings also contain notable mathematics, including a close approximation of pi. The Dhavala, the Jayadhavala and the Mahadhavala survived for centuries as palm-leaf manuscripts at Moodabidri in Karnataka, and are deeply revered by Digambara Jains.
