The 12th century heralded an age of peace and prosperity. Cultural and literary developments received impetus during the rule of King Vikramaditya VI, a patron of the fine arts. The king, who ascended the throne in 1076 and ruled for fifty years occupies a pride of place in the history of Karnataka. His reign marks the end of the use of "Saka Varsha" (Indian calendar, the "Saka era") in Chalukya inscriptions and the start of "Vikrama Varsha" ("Vikrama era"). His court was adorned with some of the most well-known writers of Kannada and Sanskrit literature. Nayasena, whose writings are dated by the scholars D.R. Nagaraj and Sheldon Pollock to the 10th century, and by E.P. Rice and R. Narasimhacharya to c. 1112, wrote the "Dharmamritha", a book containing fifteen stories that belong to the genre of fable and parable. Well known among these stories teaching about Jain tenets are "Yajnadatta and the mongoose", "Kapalika and the young elephant" and "Serpent, tiger, monkey and the goldsmith who had fallen in the old well". The writing is one of intense self-interrogation where the author criticises the beliefs of all contemporaneous religions while decrying the contamination in the original Jain beliefs due to external cultural influences, such as the practice of violent and bloody rituals and the caste system.