Mahavira Smruti Granth Part 01

SR No.: 010530
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Kamtaprasad Jain, Others
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Society Agra
Total Pages: 363
Language: Hindi
Classification: Smruti_Granth
File Size: 9 MB

Page 232

२१०
म० महावीर-स्मृति-ग्रंथ ।
Nalanda that had gained a national and even international reputation, Sanskrit was adopted as the medium of instruction aad learned compositions Nay, in some of the advanced old-type Pāthasālās of Banares, Calcutta, Madras, Mysore and Tanjore, even to the present day, Sanskrit 'continues to be the natural medium of instruction 11 Sastric subjects. Having bad to visit almost all the parts of India 10 connection with the Sessions of the All-India Oriental Conference, I have had many occasions to watch scholars from different Provinces, having no other language in common, trying to make one another tolerably well understood by means of Sanskrit. When, some twenty years ago, Rajaguru Hemaraj Pandit, C. I. E., of Nepal visited the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute of Poona, he had with him a pouth of 14 or 15 who used Sanskrit for ordinary conversation with a Huency that could well have become the object of envy for many a Professor of Sanskrit. The explanation for this is paturally to be found in the circumstance that for the vast majority of Indraas Sanskrit is still the language of their sacrameat and worship, tbe repository of their outstanding literary heirlooms and their cultural and architectural monuments scattered all over the country, a laoguage so-to-say which surcharges and enlivens the very atmosphere in which an orthodox Hindu child is reared up into adolescence And this 15 true respective of the mother tongue to which the child may happen to be bom, For, Sanskrit is at least as dear to the speakers of the modern Dravidian languages of India as to the speakers of the Sanskrit derived languages of the other parts of India. A Mahārāstrian, a Bengāli, a Telugu or a Tamitan may not possess the same intensity of love and loyalty for Hindi, our proposed Lingua Franca ; but they would out-rival one another in their study and reverence for the holy language of the Vedas, the Epics, the Puranas and the Dharmaśāstras.
The case is not much altered when we turn to Jainism and Buddhism. It is true that Sanskrit is not the actual language of their Canon ; but there is a vast amount of common mythology and folklore, besides belief in doctrines such as those of Karman and Transmigration, which all make them so intimately related to Hinduism. There also has been much mutual borrowing and assimilation between these three religions as regards beast-fable and ascetic and moral poetry. So that in ideology and phonology Sanskrit is not such an unfamilier language to Jainism and Buddhism, even ignoring for the moment the fact that much of their later-canonic, secular and scientific literature is in Sanskrit. The Buddhist Bhikkhus' proposal in favour of the "Sakkata-bbäsā" was not so absurd a proposition after all, and it has actually found its justification in the later history of the Church
We must, however, guard against one inevitable but fatal misunderstanding. The Sanskrit that was to be the common means of communication in Hinduism and in the two allied Churches was not the same as the dread night-mare of the Paniniga schoolmen. It was a very much simplified