Agam 01 Ang 01 Acharanga Sutra

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

Page 349

परिशिष्ट
315
The traditional works of Prakrit grammar are styled on the traditional Sanskrit grammars structured according to the Pāņinian system or many others up to Hemacandra. They are in the form of sūtras in Sanskrit with a commentary which explains and supplements the sütras by illustrations and technical discussions wherever necessary. As has been observed by Nitti-Dolci, Māhārāştri grammarians and the rest of other Prakrit grammarians wrote in Sanskrit; among them there were some, like Hemacandra and Kramādīśvara, who conceived Prakrit grammar as an appendix of Sanskrit grammar. There existed in Sanskrit for every system of grammar a dhātupātha in which the verbs were collected together in a section. The Prakrit grammarians were of the opinion that students would refer to them and be able to construct different types of Prakrit verbal forms, in analogy with nouns. The Prakrit grammarians did not take into account the verbs, at the time of framing the rules on the phonetic correspondences. Consequently they have expounded the alterations that the affixes have undergone without troubling their mind about the form of the verbal themes. They thought of filling up the lacunae by insertion as examples certain verbal themes of Prakrit, either in the section on conjugation or in the small supplementary list of dhātvādeśas rather as a collection of samples, than an cxposition of the whole. We can haridy say anything about grammars of the Jaina-dialects. Without a grammar, probably these dialects had been employed the most and had spread far and wide in India. Since the Prakrits of the Jaina canonical and noncanonical texts offered strong similarities with Māhārāstrī, they preferred to use the grammars of Māhārāstri by adopting it more or less according to their needs. It is due to this circumstance that Hemacandra who embarked upon teaching the diverse dialects of his religion dressed his materials about the frame-works of the sūtras of Vararuci on classical Māhārāştri. However, it so happened that a grammarian, while copying out merely inserts in his expositions certain facts taken from the languages of the texts that are of particular interest to him : the remarks on Arsa or Ardhamăgdhi that Hemacandra had made in his commentary is the result of this attitude.
Modern linguists like Sukumar Sen has noted that the Prakrit speeches, recognised by the old grammarians, that occur in Sanskrit dramas and in poems do not come in the direct line of development of