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AN EARLY EXAMPLE OF A LATE MIDDLE INDO-ARYAN POSTPOSITION ?
PAUL DUNDAS*
With the death of Professor H.C. Bhayani, Ahmedabad will never be the same again for those foreign visitors who, like me, have in the past sought advice on Prākrit, Apabhramśa, the early forms of the new Indo-Aryan languages and everything connected with Gujarat and Gujarati. At all times an unfailing source of information, good humour and intellectual energy, he is simply irreplaceable.
As I produce this on computer screen, I have beside me some of Bhayani's clear and distinctive work notes, looking at which conjures up his benign presence once again. These notes were written one afternoon in the basement of the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology as a result of my having the previous day given Professor Bhayani the offprints of some articles of mine. He had not put these aside to be read at some later date, as so many of us do with offprints, but had engaged with them immediately. It transpired that an etymology I had suggested, while worthy, was nonetheless flawed, and he was determined to talk through the derivation and investigate alternative possibilities with me.(1) This, and other occasions like it, represented a tutorial freely offered by a master scholar and it was impossible not to benefit. In writing the following short note relating to an area in which Bhayani's expertise was unrivalled, I am acutely conscious of not having been able to seek his advice about the topic beforehand. But I console myself with imagining him in that heaven where all the great philologists abide, smiling faced and with pen poised, ready to produce a stream of examples and interpretations.
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As Bhayani demonstrated in one of his later publications, it is possible to utilize stray surviving linguistic and metrical elements to get some sense of what the earliest form of Apabhramśa may have looked like around the sixth century CE, even if the earliest literary works composed in that dialect (or cluster of dialects) are not available. (2) Students of what can be styled "Middle Prākrit" should therefore be on the alert for proto-Apabhramsa (or-Late Prākrit) forms which presage a more developed usage at a later stage of Indo-Aryan linguistic evolution. (3)
Haribhadra's Pañcāsakaprakaruna, a work consisting of ninteen chapters, each of which (with one or two exceptions) consists of fifty verses in āryā metre describing Svetāmbara Jain ritual and practice, has been dated to the early sixth century CE. (4) In the course of a study of the thirteenth chapter of that work which deals with purity in the context of alms-seeking by ascetics, my attention was drawn to the following verse, specifically Pañcāśakaprakaraņa 13.41:
na khalu pariņāmamettam pudāņakāle asakkiyarahiyam gihiņo tanayam tu jaim dūsai āņāe padibuddhum. (5)
This can be translated : “ The mere resolve (to give) on the part of the householder which is devoid of bad action at the time of giving does not render faulty the ascetic who is fixed in the command (of scripture)."
The overall context of this verse will be discussed elsewhere. (6) What is linguistically noteworthy is the form taņuyam. Abhayadeva Sūri glosses this as satkam which provides a satisfactory sense without grammatical identification. On inspection, tanayam would appear here to agree with pariņāmamellam and amplify the genitive gihino, signifying in terms of function something corresponding to “relating to" or "on the part of".
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It seems difficult to dissociate tanayam in Pañcăsakaprakarana 13.41 from the postpositional adjective tunaenam added to a word in the genitive case to give the sense "because of ". The first attested occurrences of this would appear to be the Āvasyaka Cúrņi (seventh century) and Haribhadra's (eighth century) commentary on the Avasyaka Niryukti. (7) The construction is more common in late Prākrit and Apabhra ņśa (8), eventually developing into an Old Gujarati postposition. (9) If the Pancāśaka is indeed a sixth century text, as Williams claims, then this tanayum, used with a nonoblique case ending in conjunction with a genitive, may possibly be a very early example of this form. (10) Alternatively, it may be indicative of the somewhat later provenance of the text and represent a piece of evidence compelling a reconsideration of William's theory.
NOTES (1) These work notes were later expanded and published by Bhayani as "G. băp, băi, āpo, āsa and Related IA. Kinship Words”, Samipya April 1991- March 1992, pp. 39-41, a response to Paul Dundas, "Prākrit avvo", Indologica Taurinensia 8-9, 1980-1, pp. 163-7. (2) Harivallabh C. Bhayani, “On Early Apabhramsa”, Berliner Indologische Studien 7 1993, pp. 1-7. (3) For Middle Prā krit, see Frank Van Den Bossche, A Reference Manual of Middle Prākrit Grammar. The Prākrits of the Dramas and the Jain Texts. (4) This is the conclusion of R. Williams, "Haribhadra”, Bul. letin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 28 1965, pp. 101-11. Cf. the same author's Jaina Yoga: A Survey of the Medieval Srāvakācāras, London: Oxford University Press 1963, p.6. Williams wishes to locate those works attributed to
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Haribhadra which are written in what he calls "archaic Mahārāștrī” and contain in their colopha the authorial signature marks "viraha” to the early sixth century, in line with the particular tradition which has the author as dying in 529 CE. The remaining works associated with Haribhadra, that is to say those written in “standard” Mahārāştri and Sanskrit, are to be located in the eighth century and attributed to another author of the same name. (5) Text from the edition of Dīnānāth Sarma, Pārsvanath Vidyāpīth Granthamāla 92, Vārānasi: Părsvanāth Vidyāpīth 1997. The same text is also given by the Jaina Dharma Prasā raka Sabhā edition published at Bhāvnagar in 1912, which also prints Abhayadeva Sūri's commentary of 1067. Pannyās Sri Padmavijayaji Mahārāj Ganivarya, Pancāsakaprakarana , Hastināpur: Sri Nirgrantha Sāhitya Prakāśan Samgh 1999 reads usakkiya- for asakkiyâ- (misprint ?) and düsaņa for dūsei. (6) I translate and comment upon Pañcāśakaprakarana 13. 30-46 in my forthcoming study entitled “Haribhadra on giving". (7) See Thomas Oberlies, A vasyaka-Studien. Glossar ausgewählter Wörter zu E.LEUMANNs "Āvas'yakaErzählungen", Alt-und Neu-indische-Studien 45, 2, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 1993 s.v. tanenam. (8) See Collected Articles of L. A. Schwarzchild on Indo-Aryan 1953-1979, compiled by Royce Wiles, Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University 1991, pp. 89-98, who discusses the etymology of the form, and cf. Vit Bubeník, A Historical Syntax of Late Middle Indo-Aryan (Apabhramsa). Amsterdum/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company 1998, pp. 74-5. The form is not referred to by Van Den Bossche, op. cit. (9) See Trimbaklal N. Dave, A Study of the Gujarātī Lan
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________________ guage in the 16th Century (v.s), London: The Royal Asiatic Society 1935, p. 58, and cf. George Baumann, Drei Jaina Gedichte in Alt-Gujarati, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner 1975, p. 52. (10) The Paiasaddamahannavo gives tanaya as a desi form in the sense of "sambandhi", but provides only the genitive with locative example maha tanae. Its sources are Hemcandra's Prakrit grammar and the late Prakrit Surasundaricaria. PAUI, DUNDAS DEPT. OF SANSKRIT UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 7 BUCCLEUCH PLACE EDINBURGH EHS 9LW SCOTLAND U.K.