Ancient Jaina Hymns

Author(s): Charlotte Krause
Publisher: Oriental Institute

Page 52

ANCIENT JAINA HYMNS
stanzas in the presence of the king, the former poem would have been an ideal place for inserting one or another of those stanzas, or at least mentioning Ambada's name. Yet Hemacandra himself, strangely enough, is perfectly silent about the subject. This would be in order, if the restoration had been effected not in the immediate past, but many decades back, at the time when he was still a young and unknown Sādhu and shortly after he had visited that place with his Guru.
The Caritas and Prabandhas generally cannot be relied upon as revealers of absolute historical truth, since their tendency is the supply of convenient devotional reading matter, which, though based on a certain tradition re historical events and characters, is, after all, fiction to some extent. In the present case, it is, therefore, a priori possible that Ambada's restoration has been post-dated, so as to allow of its being glorified by accounts of the illustrious presence of Kumārapāla and his Guru. Devabhadra's above statement re his stay in "Amadatta's Mandira" in V. S. 1168 even raises this assumption to something like a certainty, provided it can be admitted that "Amadatta" is another of the many variants in which Ambada's name has been handed down, to mention only “Amrabhata”, “Amabhata”, “. mradeva”, “Ambāka”, “Ambada”, “Amada”, “Ambaa”.
It may be objected that the “Amadatta" in whose "Mandira" Devabhadra Suri stayed, must not be separated from the "Amadatta” mentioned in st. 29 of Dharmaghoşa Sūri's "Satruñjaya-kalpa” (composed
(1) "Satranjaya-Yatra-Vicara", Bhavnagar, V. S. 1985, p. 204.
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