Agam 01 Ang 01 Acharanga Sutra

Author(s): K R Chandra, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Prakrit Jain Vidya Vikas Fund Ahmedabad

Page 337

परिशिष्ट
teristics of the language of this canonical work should be of an archaic nature in comparison with that of later Ardhamāgadhi and other Prakrit works. But it is not so as it has continuously undergone changes willingly or unwillingly at the hands of preachers and copyists even after the canon was put to writing...as the tradition goes the emphasis was on the meaning and not on the medium."
Compounding this problem was regional mobility, as Jains from the north-east region of the sub-continent moved westward, the original oral and written transmissions of the Agamic Ardhamāgadhi tradition were impacted by such Ashokan dialects as Śauraseni and more consequentially by Mahārāṣṭri Prakrit. This would eventually lead to a jungle of variant textual readings with no uniformity of language.
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As Dr. Chandra states, "in the absence of any earlier grammatical treatise it could not be possible to protect the original form of Ardhamāgadhi. Secondly, works on Prakrit grammar are of late origin having a time gap (with the Ardhamagadhi) of one thousand to seventeen hundred years (i.e. of Vararuci, Canda and Hemacandra). These grammatical treatises do not help us in deciding the original form of Ardhamāgadhi for editing those canonical works which are comparatively regarded as the earliest compositions".
It is his contention, however, that with a thorough comparison of all extant Agamic Ardhamagadhi palm-leaf and paper manuscripts with the linguistic, stylistic and content based features of the Ashokan and Pali dialects, it is possible to extract the rudimentary Ardhamagadhi-content and context. In a mammoth undertaking, "Restoration of the Original Language of Ardhamāgadhi Texts" is the first step of what will hopefully be an ongoing project a comprehensive explication of the entire Agamic collection.
For the sutdy Dr. Chandra has selected ten words and, using a statistical methodology, compiled a textual database of all the known variants contained within the available manuscripts and compared them to the older stratum of the Ardhamāgadhi texts. As the