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1014] JAINA GAZETTE.
209 from Kosegarton's adulterated text, and Schmidt's German translation (1901) is made from a combination of two interpolated manuscripts or Purnabhadra's recension.
I must forbear speaking here of other rewritten Sanskrit texts and combinations of the two oldest Jain recensions, amongst which there are several abstracts and even a collection in which the frame stories are omitted. There is, according to Jain Granthawli, page 255, No. 79, Panchakhyasarodhar, containing 3,700 Shlokas. If anybody would give me some information about this work, or lend me a copy of it, I should be very grateful to him.
But not only did the Jains compose Panchakhyan recensions in Sanskrit, which could be understood by the shishta only; they also made this famous book known to the illiterated through adaptations in their mother tongue. In the splendid collections of manuscripts contained in the Deccan College Library at Poona and in the Sanskrit College Library at Calcutta there are several Panchakbyan versions in the Vernacular. All of them were kindly sent to me for examination, together with all the other Panchakbyana and Panchatantra manuscripts of these libraries. The results of this examination are as follows:
The mannscript Deccan College No. 741 of 1875-6 contains a collection of stories entitled Panchakhyan Vartika, i. e., Commentary on' or, translation of, the Panchakhyana.' This is a very important work, as it contains a great many new stories, 22 in number, part of which we find again in a Marathi, in some South Indian and in a Nepalese version of the Panchatantra. Its author must have been a Jaida layman, who must have lived in Gujarat, near the Marwar Frontier. For the language of his book is old Gujarati with occasionally, Marwar forms. He omits the frame stories, giving only the single tales. At the head of each tale there is always a Katha Shloka in Sanskrit. As these Shlokas are very often faulty, and as their parport often disagrees with that of the subsequent stories, it is clear that he was not a learned man. Hence he gives even those stories (27 in namber) which are based on the 'textus simplicior' or on
Purnabhadra's recension, in most cases in other forms, no doubt Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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