________________
302
आचाराङ्ग
cal approach to guess why this type of reading does not occur. In a similar way we also see ege vs eke, but not ee. We can imagine several stages for the development of Prakrit. It is true 'indeed that we must take into account the Inscriptional Prakrits and Pali in this respect, but they should not be taken as the only guidelines for the older specimens of Ardhamāgadhi. Sometimes Ardhamāgadhi shows greater affinity with old Persian than with classical Sanskrit, e.g. a great many pronominal forms of ima MIA, masc, imo, neut. imam, Ang. imesim and so on. So also Māgadhi gen. with -āha as in puliśāha<purisāsa-puruşasya reminds us the gen. form -āha in old Persian as in māzdāha. However, Dr. Chandra has shown the way for the future scholars how to do research work for a missing link. When most of the manuscripts betray the Prakrit editors, Dr. Chandra's work will guide us in this dry and dust subject. Calcutta 1-5-94
- Satya Ranjan Banerjee
As a methodological exemplar, Dr. K.R.Chandra's Restoration of the Original Language of Ardhamāgadhi Texts' is an outstanding contribution to both Ardhamāgadhi and Jaina textual scholarship. Ardhamāgadhi is a variant of Prakrit and was instrumental in the early development of the Jaina tradition.
Although the oldest Jaina Canonical literature, such as the Ācārānga-I, the Satrakrtānga-l and the Rşibhāsitāni were originally composed in an archaic form of Ardhamāgadhi, it is Dr. Chandra's contention that over time the original idiom of these texts suffered so many alterations that the primary linguistic forms are almost unrecognizable. For example, some of these alterations included the interchange of jahā for jadhā, ahā for adhā, and "the older Prakrit form of the Sanskrit yathā as adhā (compared with the atha of the castern Ashokan inscriptions in which the initial y- of the Sanskrit yathā is lost)".
The problem is, according to Dr. Chandra, that “the charac
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
